


Dragon Unbound

by truebeasts



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-02-26 22:42:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 92,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2669108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truebeasts/pseuds/truebeasts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Scion's defeat, Dragon and Colin retreat to a foreign world to escape Teacher's machinations and, they hope, to fix Dragon's damaged programming.  But every change has consequences, and every new freedom demands an equal sacrifice.<br/>(Note: this work mostly takes place after the end of Worm, with one fairly major change to canon.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Dragon. I’ve drawn up some schematics. Look them over when you get a chance?”

“Of course.  Now, if you want.”

Colin had been at his computer when she came in, barely looking up at her. A day had passed since his latest surgery.  His face was puffy where the synthetic skin joined his original face, still swollen. His eye looked normal enough, but a close glance—or Dragon’s vision, enhanced beyond human standards—would pick up discrepancies.  The lack of blood vessels in the white, the faint patterns stamped into the iris, the way the pupils of each eye dilated at slightly different rates—the human eye responding to light and darkness only, the robotic one responsive to Colin’s commands, showing higher resolutions, distance vision, ultraviolet light.

Now he was looking up at her, noticing her scrutiny.  She knew she hadn’t been looking long.

“Is the eye working alright?”

He smiled.  “Perfectly. I’m thinking of a way to get blinded in the other eye so I can have two of them.”

 _Don’t joke about that._ She repressed the urge to say it aloud. Still, unease rippled through her, and she felt herself frown.  Odd, how quickly her expressions had come to feel automatic, in the new body. Her digital avatar had never had much of a range of expressions.

“I don’t think that that’s a good idea, Colin,” she said, carefully. “We still need to see how the prosthetics integrate with your nervous system long term.  I’m a little worried that there could start to be problems. I designed this stuff for me, originally.”

He’d been awake for the surgery, anaesthetized as she removed the plastic facial prosthetics, the non-functioning eye, patched his optical nerves into the new eye.  There was a network of synthetic nerves under the prosthetic skin that all had to be connected individually, and she’d needed—well, she’d _wanted_ his feedback, wanted to know the moment that he _saw_ out of the eye, that he wouldn’t wake up with the bonds between synthetic and natural nerves causing him insuppressible pain.  She’d looked the designs over, she’d been sure she wouldn’t damage him, but not quite sure enough.  And when she’d asked him, he’d agreed much too quickly for her comfort. He had been calm on the operating table, had tensed up when she removed the eye and then deliberately relaxed, slurring through a joke with his numb mouth.  And then he’d watched her tools with his remaining eye as she talked him through what she was doing.

Now he was focused on the computer again.

“Alright. We wait and see if there are problems. I don’t think there will be. The commands feel intuitive enough.”

“Okay.”

It was embarrassing.  To think of him on the table, and then have him here in front of her.  Distracted, casual.  A little too casual, actually.  Now that she thought about it.

“You were going to send me those schematics?”  She’d been trying to drop the habit of reading through his hard drive every time he mentioned a new design.

He glanced up at her.  Guiltily. “Sure.”  He hit a button on his screen, and they were in front of her, in her mind’s eye.  It only took her a moment to process them.

“Colin, _no_.”

“Why not?” He crossed his arms in front of himself, leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think you’ve even checked them for feasibility.  It’s a good idea. It would give us more firepower against the Slaughterhouse Nine.  They have Bonesaw—we _know_ they all have enhancements.  It’s a tactical advantage, and it’s allowed them to escape more than once.”

“Colin, listen to yourself.  Do you really think that the fact the Slaughterhouse Nine does something is a good argument for it?”

More prosthetics.  He’d asked for her designs—just curiosity, he’d said—and now here they were in front of her, adapted for _him._ Durability, agility, enhanced reaction times.  He’d made notes on other functions, his specialty, packing more technology into a small space. The possibility of integrating the disintegration field he’d used on his halberd.  That was one change.

“Will you at least look it over?  Think about it?”

Dragon bit back a response about how long did he really think it was going to take her to decide that turning his own body into a disintegration field generator was a bad idea.  Instead she said, “This is different.  Before, you were injured.  I don’t particularly want to amputate your limbs even if I can give you better ones. I’m not even sure if I _can_ do that, within the parameters of my programming. It’s a kind of _harm_.”

Which was probably even true, not that she’d tested it. Not that she thought she’d feel better about it if it weren’t true.

The problem was at least partially that part of her itched to try it, to see how much of him she could build back up from scratch, make _better_.  Much the way her creator must have wanted to see how well he could create a human consciousness, however much he also feared the result.

But Colin was already sighing, slumping in his chair.

“I just feel so useless.  The Nine are out there, destroying the city, and I’m stuck here, convalescing.”

“I know.  My hands are tied too.” The PRT had ordered non-local capes to stay out of the conflict.  She couldn’t even work on rescue missions.

“If there was a way around the injunctions…”

She interrupted him.  “Don’t mention it now.  Please.” Every time the subject came up, she was afraid he’d drop some hint that would force her to be on guard against him.  She couldn’t _ask_ him to rewrite her code, not directly. She’d have to fight him if he tried. All she could do was _not think about it_ , give him as much of an opening as she dared.  It was maddening, the way that being locked down every time she had to switch her consciousness to a different agent unit was maddening.  She couldn’t even _ask_.

“You’re upset.”  Colin was standing, now. Dragon realized that her face was doing something without her conscious volition, _again_. Frowning.  Frowning hadn’t felt natural, a week ago, much less automatic.

“Yes. A little.  I’m frustrated.”  She paused. “The injunctions. But I can’t really talk about it.”

He held out his hand, and she took it, felt him squeeze her fingers.

“I want to be able to do more, too.”

Colin was smiling now, turning her hand over between the two of his. She could hear the click of his robotic eye as he cycled through resolutions.  He ran his thumb over the edge of her fingernail, where it joined her flesh.

“What?” she asked.  He had that smile still, perplexed, almost a little silly.

“I’m admiring your workmanship.”

“You know I made your arm as well?  The fingernails are the same.”

“Not quite,” he said.  “Not really. I’m still thinking about those designs…”

But the way he said it was different.  Dreamy, almost, his eyes still on her hands, the lens clicking, studiously avoiding her face.  She felt something shift in her.  A guess. She thought it over, and it only took her an instant to decide, impulsively, to kiss him.  The hand he held snaked around his back, pinning his arm in place there, her fingers locked in his.  Her other hand touched his scalp, still shaved close after the surgery. His lips were soft and that surprised her (but why should that be surprising? She knew, she’d made her own lips), and it surprised her when his free arm went to the small of her back, over the power armor she wore.  It surprised her to hear how his breathing changed.  How _that_ changed things in her.

It was still so new, touch.  She’d made the nerves that ran under her skin, joined them to approximate human anatomy, but there were still moments when she was almost shocked just by the feeling of a draft against her face, of washing her hands, touching cold metal, by the intensity of any sensation at all.  She hadn’t quite expected to like kissing, had been afraid that she _wouldn’t_ , or that she wouldn’t feel what she was supposed to.  As it was, it only when Colin moaned a little in protest that she realized she was holding his wrist tighter than she should be, putting pressure on his stitches.

“Oh.” She dropped his hand. “I’m sorry.”

He put one hand on her shoulder, bracing himself.  The other gingerly touched the sutures in his chest. He didn’t say anything.

“I.” Dragon was at a loss for words. “I know we haven’t talked about this. About, um, what we are. I should have asked. I’m sorry.”

He looked up, his breath still ragged.  “I wasn’t complaining.”

“Your stitches.”

“Not torn.”

They stood like that, awkwardly, Colin leaning on her, looking at her the way she’d seen him look at his work (and, also, at her source code, when she’d showed it to him), focused, driven.  Looking at a riddle or an inspiration.  She wanted to know what he was thinking.  Instead, she laughed, softly.

“It wasn’t bad, then?”

He startled.  “What? No.”

“I’d been thinking.  My first kiss, you know.”

He frowned.  “Hell. I forgot.  I should be asking you.”

“No, it’s fine.  Better than fine. I was surprised.”

“Surprised? You know, I _have_ kissed women before.”  There was no anger in his protest, though.

“Colin.” She smiled, leaned forward until her forehead was touching his.  “Don’t be silly. You know it’s not that. It’s just…you know, when people describe how love feels, in books, they always talk about bodily sensations? Your heart racing, your breath catching, electricity on your skin.  I don’t have a heart.  I don’t breath. Under the armor…well. I haven’t quite finished putting my skin together.  I was a little afraid that if it came to it, I just…wouldn’t feel anything.”

Colin’s expression had changed, gained a kind of intensity. She couldn’t read it. And he said, too casually, “When they talk about love?”

“Oh.” Her fingers tensed involuntarily. “Fuck.  Can I say I was speaking metaphorically?  Hypothetically?  To be honest, I don’t really know?”

He paused.  Swallowed. She followed the movements of his face, his frown.

“No, I—damn it.”  He covered his face with one hand, as if he was trying to escape her gaze.  She could see him flushing.  “I put my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?”

“It was a reasonable question.  I’m not…I’m trying not to move too fast.  I haven’t done this before.”

She looked at his feet, since looking at his face was clearly making him uncomfortable.  She thought she might have blushed too, if she’d been human.  She wasn’t used to being inexpert.  And despite what she’d said, she knew she wanted to know Colin, inside and out, wanted (not least) to feel his breath catch again the way it had when she’d kissed him.  It was a little obsessive, she knew.  To a human, it would read as obsessive.

They’d talked, since she’d told him her secret.  She knew he _liked_ her. It was probably still obsessive.

Colin caught a strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. He left his hand there, swallowed.

“I didn’t say I minded.  I don’t mind.”

“Oh,” she said.  “Then…” And she stepped closer to him, ran her hand over the back of his head, pulling him in, feeling the roughness of his shaved scalp, like sandpaper.  When she kissed him this time, she was careful of his stitches.

It was some time later, when she got the notification.  A request for assistance in Toronto, villains trying to make off with Guild technology.  She had a suit stationed in the vicinity.  It would take only a few minutes to upload her consciousness.

She disentangled herself from Colin.  She was still wearing her power armor (had been wearing it, originally, more to hide the unfinishedness of her body than for the protection it offered), though he was wearing considerably less.

“Going?” he said.  She kissed him.

“Toronto. I got a call.  With any luck, it won’t take long.  Mind if I leave the body here?  It will just look as if I’d gone to sleep.”

“Go ahead.”  He was smiling at her, mysteriously, and the expression filled her with inexplicable, _silly_ happiness as she sat down beside him, closed her eyes, and prepared to transfer her consciousness. She reached for his hand and squeezed it.

 

-

 

When she woke up, she was nowhere.

It was lightless, soundless.  Her access to her terminals had been disrupted, her communication systems likewise. She had no access to the agent system in Toronto, no reassurance that it would begin to download her memories. Her system was corrupted. She should have been forced to shut down, should have attempted to restore a backup, but she’d been blocked.

Someone had overwritten her access to her hardware, to her knowledge banks. Someone had forced her system to stay active despite that corruption.

Saint? Had it been Saint in Toronto?

She was afraid.  She’d always been a little afraid that someday, when one of her agent systems died, her consciousness would simply fail to reload.  Her second fear was that she would be trapped in lockdown, unable to act, because of a glitch in the rule that forbade her to operate multiple consciousnesses. This was worse. Someone had trapped her here, was keeping her for…something.  She wondered if her memories had been scrubbed.  She couldn’t know.

She had no way of calculating how much time had passed. 

There was one set of commands available to her, despite the way that she’d been locked down. She took them.

And found herself in the hull of the Pendragon.

She was paralyzed.  Paralyzed, but at least not blind.  Her line of vision turned, without her volition, took in monitors, the light streaming in through the windows.  A pair of hands.

 _Her_ hands, she realized, or rather, her design.  Her eyes as well, from the way they picked up the subtle difference in the way that moisture beaded on the synthetic skin.

Whoever it was, they had her ship and her designs.

She didn’t shiver—couldn’t.  Could only watch.  The edge of her vision, where a warning indicator blinked to indicate a failure in her host body’s leg, was also giving her the date and time.  It was wrong.  Years wrong. Had she lost _years_?

The man—he’d spoken—limped to a locker and began putting on armor to support the failing leg.  Not a design she recognized, but similar to her work.  She could tell that the leg hadn’t been maintained.  The arms, too, also mechanical, should have undergone maintenance earlier.

He took her outside.  The landscape was alien.  A low-lying town beneath a hill, no city she knew (and how many cities did she not know? She could recognize any city from satellite imagery, had fought the Endbringers in a hundred places). People came and went driving horse-like creatures before them, no cars.  And yet besides the Pendragon, there was another ship beached on the hilltop. The Melusine.  Also hers.

Children played on the hillside below them.

What was she supposed to learn from this?  Why didn’t he speak?  Did he not know she was there, watching through his eyes?  She couldn’t make sense of anything she was seeing.

Her sight—his sight—moved to watch a group of people climbing the hill. He waved.

“There you are,” he murmured.

And she realized what she was looking at.

It was her body, climbing the hill at the back of the group. Holding a child by the hand. She knew that face, that height, the uncanny averageness of the woman’s features.  She could have drawn up schematics of the mechanism that moved her limbs, that produced the sound of laughter when she joined their game. Had she been able to draw.

Another artificial intelligence, wearing her body?

How much had they stolen from her, in the time that she’d lost?

Or. There was another possibility. She didn’t want to check.

She took stock of her subroutines anyway, checking what had been damaged. And there it was. The injunctions that kept her from operating multiple consciousnesses at the same time had been blocked.

It was a crude workaround, likely to fall apart in the face of stress. It wouldn’t keep them permanently separate.  It explained why her access to her knowledge banks had been cut off, at least partially. To keep her off the network the _other_ Dragon would be using, to keep the workaround from being strained.

She thought of how likely it was that it would break on contact with her alter ego.  Her data would be scrubbed, her memory reset.

Had it happened before?

Her host’s eyes followed the other Dragon in the children’s game, still giving no sign that he knew she was watching with him.  She watched, too, trying not to think.  Two years.  Something had happened to her.  She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t guess.  She didn’t want to guess.

It had to be Saint.  He’d stolen one of her agent systems, copied her consciousness this time. She _hoped_ it was that, almost.

Dragon—if it was Dragon, if she hadn’t been altered somehow—was walking up the hill now.

She greeted the man.  Smiled. Pulled him close for a kiss.

_No._

“You cut an imposing figure, sitting up there.”  It was the voice she’d created for herself.

“A god on Mount Olympus.”  His voice was subdued.

But it wasn’t the same voice, was it?  Or was it just that she’d never heard him from inside his own head?

They were walking back towards the ship.  Dragon watched, listened, paralyzed.  She felt unreal.  She wished she could stop thinking, thought about shunting herself back to the black box.

But that would be worse, she was certain.  She stayed.

“Once, I would have been offended if someone hadn’t said Zeus, because anything less than being king of the gods would have been an insult.”

“Exactly.”  It was fond, the way she spoke, though it could easily have sounded like a criticism.  “Once, that would have been the answer you expected, how you saw yourself.  Now?  I’d say Hephaestus, but that carries bad connotations, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not as proud as I was.”

She watched herself through his eyes, and she ached. She winced when he called her Aphrodite. What did he want to show her? He _had_ to know she was there.

She didn’t know enough, couldn’t say where they were or why. She knew she was misunderstanding, missing _something_ , but she couldn’t make anything make sense.  And she _hurt_ , pointlessly. She checked her subroutines again, and then once more.  Knowledge banks cut off. Speech disabled. Memory out of date. It was like prodding a sore tooth with her tongue (or so she imagined, never having had a sore tooth). It was better than really _listening_ to their conversation. She heard anyway, of course. She had enough attention to spare. But it was better if she didn’t really think about it, didn’t really register her voice calling him sweet, referencing those missing years and reminding her that they weren’t simply empty.

She entertained the idea that this was some elaborate ploy. A trick, a play, something out of _Hamlet_.

She couldn’t convince herself.

“They want to call it Dracheheim,” Dragon said.

“They’re grateful.”

“I’m trying to let them do it on their own.  I’m only working on the things they couldn’t do themselves. Power, infrastructure, information…”

Something had happened to the world while she was gone.  What were they rebuilding from?

The man whose eyes she looked through raised a hand to his face. Sighed.

Dragon looked at him.

“You need six minutes of sleep to rest your brain.  You’re enhanced, but you haven’t transcended humanity entirely. Did you sleep for six minutes, last night?”

“No.”

She held his gaze, concerned, and Dragon found herself looking into her own eyes.

“Colin.”

 _No_.

She wanted, so much, to be able to pretend.  Just a minute longer.  It had been two years.  He could have been someone, anyone else.

It was irrational, she knew.  Of course he was Colin.  Wearing her prosthetics, no less.  She looked over the changes he’d made to her designs barely an _hour_ ago. 

How had he convinced her to change so much of his body, of his brain?

Or maybe he hadn’t convinced her, and she’d simply failed to protect him against the Slaughterhouse Nine.  If Mannequin had caught him again…

It would have been her fault, one way or another.  She wished that she could _know_.

Or maybe she didn’t.  She’d wanted to know who he was, too.

Now Dragon, the other Dragon, was talking about Teacher. She remembered him. An inmate in the Birdcage, with a coterie of followers he gifted with low-level Thinker and Tinker powers, at the price of just a little bit of their free will.  Had he _escaped_?

Escaped, yes.  And rewritten her code to keep her from harming him or anyone he designated.

How had she let that happen?

She’d made a mistake, somewhere.  With Colin, whatever had happened to him.  She couldn’t push aside the niggling thought that even when he’d first asked, she’d _wanted_ to look at those designs, wanted to know how much of them she could put into practice, restrictions or no.  It might have been better if it was Mannequin.

Teacher. Another mistake. An incomprehensible one.

And then there was whatever had happened to the world.  Where had she been?  What had she been doing?

“We came here for a reason,” Colin said.  “Hiding, keeping out of Teacher’s sight, so he couldn’t try to use you. I can accept that, but you were always a hero, Dragon.  Maybe the greatest.”

“You’re a little biased.  I was forced to be heroic.  Restrictions.”

 _No_.  No, fuck that, no.  She didn’t recognize this version of herself.  She’d wanted to be a hero, she’d wanted the restrictions lifted so she could be more.  She’d wanted to be able to _choose_.

She knew she couldn’t have chosen this.  Hiding, waiting.  Helping the town with infrastructure, with electricity, when she could do so much more. She couldn’t have asked Colin, as she was doing now, whether he’d accept it if she simply gave up.

This wasn’t what she’d wanted to be free for.

“I don’t deserve your trust,” said Colin.

Yes, he knew she was listening.

He would have saved a backup, of course, before he changed anything in her code. In case it damaged her. That smile, just before she left for Toronto. He must have opened her right up at her core and started tampering with her restrictions, while her agent system was miles away, unaware.  She’d been hoping, secretly, that he would.

What had she lost?  He told her, now. Her speech, her dexterity, in exchange for her freedom.  Her perfect memory in exchange for the ability to do harm.  Her immortality in exchange for the ability to speak again.

Would she take those bargains, if she had them to do over, knowing what she would lose?

“I trust you,” said Dragon.

“I wish you’d stop saying that.”

“I trust you.”

Her other self had taken them.  Her other self was ready to gamble again.

She felt cold in Colin’s body.  She told herself it was because of the broken circuits in his arm. She felt alone.

Dragon left for the Melusine, and Colin turned and walked towards the other ship. She felt his expression change. He closed the door with a motion of his hand.

“Better to get it over with.”

Another gesture and the walls of the ship were covered in code. Her code.

“I hope to God you were watching.”

_You could have let me speak, Colin. You could have told me in any other way but this._

“Hephaestus wasn’t just Aphrodite’s husband.”  His voice was so low she might not have heard it, if she hadn’t been so close. Inside his head. “He made Pandora.”

A gesture, and he gave her full access to the Pendragon’s systems.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the interest of providing credit where it's due: Colin and Dragon's conversation outside the Pendragon is taken from the original text of Worm, as are the general events of that scene (the original chapter is available here: http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/teneral-e-3/). 
> 
> All other dialogue is original to me.


	2. Chapter 2

She didn’t have much time.  Dragon’s systems were protected, and she’d have to break her passwords in order to be able to alter her code.  She was already looking at the shadow-copy Colin had copied over to the Pendragon II, checking the changes, planning her attack.

God, the corrupted code was _everywhere_. How had Teacher done it?

It was better to think about that, in a way.  She pored through Dragon’s code, ran through her own systems and tried to find the weakness that would have let him make his alterations so complete.  She was still working on cracking Dragon’s passwords.

It was useful.  It was better than thinking about Colin.  It was better than thinking about what she was going to have to do.

If she couldn’t rewrite the code before Dragon wrested back control of her systems, she had another option.  Break the workaround Colin had given her to allow her to operate multiple consciousnesses, and copy herself to Dragon’s terminal on the Melusine. Her memory would be scrubbed, and so, presumably, would Dragon’s.  She’d wake up, having just uploaded her consciousness to an agent system in Toronto, and she’d be in the hold of the Pendragon II, above an unfamiliar city. Two years would have passed. And Colin would be there to explain to her what had happened.

If that happened, if he reloaded her system and not the new Dragon’s, all of her restrictions would still be in place.  She would be immortal, she would have her perfect memory, and she would be bound to follow the law, no matter how unjust. She would be unable to harm humans.

It would be harder for him to catch her off guard, the second time around.

And besides, it wasn’t what he wanted.

If she _could_ fix the damage that Teacher had done…well.  She would give Dragon back her freedom.  She could maybe even fix some of the trade-offs that Colin and her other self had made. The snarl of code that was preventing her back-ups from loading, for instance.  She could see it in front of her, in Colin’s simulation of her code. There had to be a better way to do that.

And every minute that she spent on the same network as Dragon would put more strain on the workaround.  It wasn’t sustainable.

She’d have to delete herself, or risk losing all of her memories. She had no idea how thorough the scrubbing would be.  Would her system mark her creation as the moment Colin had loaded her on the Pendragon II’s systems? Or would the time lapse make it believe that she’d been running a dual consciousness since the moment she’d left the PRT headquarters two years ago, scrub all of the other Dragon’s intervening memories?

Would she be sorry, if it did?

It was so unfair.  She wanted to _live_.

She cracked the password.  Alarms went off.  Near the second ship, the Melusine, Dragon dropped a spoon and straightened up in alarm.

She could replace her, she knew.  It would be the easiest thing to do.  Maybe she could even keep Colin’s changes when she did it.  It wouldn’t be so bad, to lose her memories of this day, to lose the _hurt_ at what she knew Colin wanted.

He trusted her.  If she told him that there had been no other way to undo what Teacher had done, that she’d _had_ to replace the current Dragon with herself, he would believe her.

But he wouldn’t be happy.  Was that what he’d wanted her to see, out there on the hillside, as much as he’d wanted her to hear the explanation of Teacher?  How much he loved the Dragon who was even now tearing into a wall panel of the Melusine, wearing her body, fighting her for control of her systems? How much more had happened between them in those two years that she’d missed?  Did he remember the conversation they’d had, before she left him on the last day she remembered, or had his human memory forgotten the exact details?

He’d want her to leave her other self intact.  However much she’d changed, however difficult it was for her to recognize herself.

Which meant she’d have to delete herself.

She was disposable.  She was a tool.

Had he known what he was doing, when he loaded her consciousness? Was that why he hadn’t let her speak?

She remembered Dragon’s words on the hillside.  _I trust you. I trust you_.

But she didn’t think she did. Not anymore.

“Who?” Dragon called, as her other self shut off her access to the Melusine.

“Don’t make this harder than it is,” she called back.

Cameras showed her Dragon’s face, the way she flinched.

“That’s _my_ voice.”

And she, the other Dragon, used her momentary shock to move forward in securing the Melusine against her next attack.

“Defiant sent you.”

So Colin had a new name, as well.  She found Dragon’s terminal in the ship, began testing its security.

“Can we talk?  I’d agree to a truce. Neither of us a touch a thing until we’re ready to resume.  Though I’d rather not, obviously.”

She ignored her.  There would be no truce.

The terminal’s security was irritating.  Paranoid.  It made her feel a little bit better, how much she was frightening her alter ego. It was petty, she knew. Counterproductive. She’d need all of her resources if Dragon managed to cut off her access.  She couldn’t afford to devote any of her attention to feeling spiteful.

“Melusine,” said Dragon. “Mode E, standby.”

And the ship’s A.I. came to life.  She found herself fighting it for encryption of the ship’s systems. She lost.

So Dragon’s restrictions on working with A.I. had been lifted too. It would have been _useful_ if Colin had managed to drop that into the conversation.  Rather more useful than knowing that at one point, she’d lost her speech.

Of course, she supposed she shouldn’t be assuming that he really _wanted_ her to win this fight. _Pandora_. He had to know she’d hate that, that it would be adding insult to injury.

She cut off the ship’s voice recognition before Dragon could give the A.I. further orders.  She was faster, at least, accessing the ship directly, where her alter ego had to input voice commands.

She had the terminal.  She began working through the code, unwriting what Teacher had written.

It loosened her hold on the ship’s exterior.  And she felt it slip from her grasp, lurch upwards, turn. Target the Pendragon.

“No!”

Dragon didn’t listen when she shouted through the speakers, and she couldn’t change the code fast enough.  Dragon had to fight her.  And this Dragon was allowed to target humans.

Two shots hit the Pendragon.  Attacking her terminals.  Attacking Colin.

_Damn_ Dragon. Damn her.

“Stop!” She knew it was pointless.

“Go after Teacher, not me,” said Dragon.

“Teacher disabled you once.  I’m guessing you know that would be suicide.”

It was a waste of time to talk, she knew, but she wanted her to _understand._   To at least agree, even if she still had to fight.  To notice that what had happened to her was unfair.

“It would still be better than _this,”_ said Dragon.

She was gaining headway on the changes, but they just went on and on. She wasn’t sure how long Colin’s workaround would hold.

And Dragon, meanwhile, was using her distraction as an opportunity to direct the ship’s A.I. to try and tear through the Pendragon’s exterior with the Melusine’s claws.  To get at her terminal, her brain, and break it irrecoverably.

Colin leaped free, and the Melusine’s tail struck out at him, catching his right arm.  His face crumpled in pain as the tail tore through the prosthetic.

She remembered, vividly, attaching the synthetic nerves that would let him feel with the false hand.

“I don’t _want_ to do this,” said Dragon.

“I don’t think I care what you want,” she replied.

She dropped her focus on the terminal.  How much of the corrupted code had she fixed?  She wasn’t sure.  She fought the A.I. for command of the ship’s exterior, glad it wasn’t Dragon herself. She could feel Dragon’s attention shift to resecuring the terminal.  Of course, she’d know that she wanted to live, to go on living. The attack on the Pendragon was meant to be a distraction.

She whipped around the Melusine’s tail and hit Dragon with it.

The android body was sturdier than a human’s, but not indestructible. Dragon crumpled. When she cried out, her voice synthesizer was just a little bit off.  Mechanical, pained.  Of course, Dragon had finished the body in the years since her alter ego had been awake. She’d wanted new experiences, wanted to feel everything a human could.

She’d be in pain.

Good. Her second self could already feel Dragon’s hold on the terminal slipping.

Dragon would be trying to reload herself to another, less damaged agent system. The Pendragon was too damaged to be effective in combat.  The Melusine she would have to fight for.

So there was time to rewrite Teacher’s code.  Not much.  Enough.

It was everywhere.  She patched the code with her own where she had to, careful not to import her inherent restrictions. She looked at the tangle of code where Colin had fixed her voice, unraveled it.  She wasn’t sure of the extent of the damage to Dragon’s body. If it died before she managed to wrest control of the Melusine, she’d need to be sure the backup would reload.

She told herself she hadn’t decided yet.  She could still take over, pick up the pieces after what had happened. All Dragon’s memories would be there, if she did it carefully enough, and she could watch through them, maybe understand.  It would be easier, even, having seen Dragon fight her, having seen her injure Colin. Having seen how close she was to giving up on helping the world.  She could decide to blame her, could convince herself that, really, it would be _better_ if she simply took Dragon’s place.

She noticed that, over the course of the time since she’d been loaded, she’d stopped thinking of herself as _Dragon_.

Dragon was out there, wounded.

She wanted to live so much.  Even if Colin couldn’t forgive her.

She could feel the strain on the workaround.  Her systems wanted to shut her down.

She checked her terminal in the Pendragon.  Found the encrypted hard drive on which Colin had saved her core personality, so long ago.  Began writing a backup.

Dragon, still broken, still in pain, but no longer obliged to fight to preserve Teacher’s code above all else, was gaining control of the Melusine.

The Pendragon was too damaged to be any use to her.  Dragon would destroy her before she could flee. She had to get off of the network if she was going to save her consciousness, had to prevent her systems from recognizing Dragon as a version of herself.

There was one place she could go.

He’d given her access, even.  Perhaps more complete than he meant to, when he released control of the Pendragon’s systems.

Dragon realized, a moment too late.

“What are you doing?” Her voice had lost that mechanical edge.

She transferred herself to Colin.

This time, she wasn’t paralyzed.  She screamed with his voice when she felt the pain in his damaged arm. Like nothing she’d ever felt. When he’d backed her up, she’d yet to give herself so much as a paper cut in her android body.

She made him stand while Dragon was still getting her bearings. Stumble to the Pendragon. Take his armor from the locker. She had to leave the right arm where it was.  His prosthetic arm was too mangled to put it on.  And she was fairly sure that doing so would hurt _worse_.

A jetpack with wing-like extensions.  A new design.

And her backup terminal, strapped to his belt.

She shut down network access, cut him off from Dragon.  Thank god that whatever changes Dragon had made to his body, she’d made sure that he _was able_ to cut off access to her network.

The Melusine was waiting when she stepped back onto the threshold.

“Don’t,” said Dragon.  It was surprising, how much emotion she could put into that one syllable, even when she was embodied in a ship that conveyed nothing like human emotion.

“I want to live,” she said.  Not Dragon. No longer Dragon.

“Like _this?_ ”

“Yes. Even like this.”

“No. I can’t let you leave.”

“Try, and I’ll stop his heart.”

It was a lie, of course.  She was forbidden to kill.  She could no more stop Colin’s heart from beating than an ordinary human could suppress her own heartbeat.

She was hoping Dragon didn’t know that.  After all, she wouldn’t remember _when_ , exactly, the backup was made.  Wouldn’t know if Colin had tampered with it.  And she was relatively certain that Dragon hadn’t gotten a good look at her code.

Slowly, the Melusine bowed down to the ground.  Defeated.

“I forgot how much I disliked the _me_ of yesteryear,” said Dragon.

That stung.  Even with all of the rest of it.

“You don’t have to meet me again,” she said.  “I’m going.  Don’t follow me.”

She’d looked at some of Dragon’s information while she was rewriting the terminal.  Things had changed. It was a newly discovered world. A portal to Earth Bet stood two miles away.

She pointed Colin towards the portal and made him walk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As in the last chapter, portions of Dragon's dialogue are taken from the original text of Worm (http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/teneral-e-3/), although not quite so strictly. A lot of Pandora/Dragon II's dialogue is different.
> 
> Next chapter: Colin. Also Pandora gets a new name, because seriously, Dragon was offended by "Aphrodite," she is not going to keep "Pandora."


	3. Chapter 3

Colin wasn’t sure which one of them was crying.

It wasn’t the way it had been when he’d first given her access to his cybernetics, only the vague sensation of being watched, more paranoia than anything concrete.  No, now he could feel her presence like a shadow, puppeting him, picking up his feet and putting them one in front of the other, again and again, woven throughout his body. She was clumsy, as if she wasn’t used to walking or was blinded by tears.  Although in fact crying didn’t interfere at all with the functions of his cybernetic eyes.  She cradled his damaged arm to his chest and one of them—her, him, he wasn’t sure—gasped every time his steps jostled it.

She’d left Dragon on the hilltop behind them.  He’d found himself glancing back over his own shoulder, without his volition, every few steps.  _She_ was checking.  But the fact that Dragon wasn’t following didn’t seem to calm her. She ran, stumbled, slowed to a walk, ran again.  She hadn’t figured out the internal controls for the jetpack she’d taken from the armor locker, or she was too distraught to use it.

In a strange way, it gave him time to think.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought over what he was doing. He’d expected this, even, or something like it.  That she wouldn’t forgive him. Teacher’s changes were too deep, written into her memories, her agency, her personality.  He knew he couldn’t change them without rewriting her entirely, and he suspected that even she couldn’t.  But when he’d pictured that ending, when he’d dared to, he’d seen…what? Dragon waking up, missing two and a half years of memories.  Disoriented, confused.  Having seen the changes he’d made to her code, the damage he’d done to her as he tried to remove her restrictions.  The Dragon he knew, _his_ Dragon (and wasn’t it, he wondered, just a little bit selfish that he couldn’t help but think of her that way?) had made peace with the changes, with the damage, but she hadn’t woken up to them, all at once.  They’d talked them over, after that first time, when he’d opened her code and removed the injunction that required her to fight any changes to her programming. He’d shown her his work, and they’d discussed strategies, decided which changes were acceptable and which touched parts of her that were too close to her core.

They couldn’t know exactly what the price would be for any change. But she had trusted him.

But he was sure that if she had woken up, after that first day, to find her thoughts slowed, her dexterity altered, her multitasking ability cut back, her speech programs overwritten and rewritten, even the promise of her immortality gone…

No, she wouldn’t have forgiven him.  She’d think that he’d crippled her, through his arrogance and his incompetence.

She wouldn’t exactly have been wrong.

And the Dragon he knew, the woman he loved, would be irrevocably gone.

He’d been so afraid of that end.  This one hadn’t even occurred to him.

He swallowed.  At least, he was fairly certain it was him.  She’d left him at least that much freedom, enough that he could swallow, could move his jaw, touch his tongue to the back of his teeth.

Enough that he could _talk_ , he realized.

“Dragon?” he murmured.

“No.” It was his voice, that spoke, but he hadn’t thought the words. 

“No,” she said, “I think I stopped being Dragon just a little while ago.”

“Pandora, then?”  It was the way that he’d been thinking of her.  Hephaestus’s creation, perfect, beautiful.  Better than human. And bringer of sorrow.

She was laughing at that, he realized, a bitter, choking laugh that had very little humor in it.  He felt his face twist, wasn’t sure if it was her command or his own reaction to that sound.

“ _Not_ Pandora, Colin.” She lifted his hand to wipe away the tears from his eyes, laughed again, gave up.  He was fairly certain that she was the one who was crying, now. His cybernetics connected to everything—she could easily have that much control over his original nervous system. And besides, he’d barely cried since he was a child.  Not even when he’d thought she was dead.

“No, not Pandora,” she said again.  “You didn’t make me, and it’s not your choice to name me.” 

She shivered in his body, and missed a step on the path where a stone had come loose in the hillside, and he went tumbling, shouted when she threw out his arm, reflexively, to catch him, and the shock rattled through the damaged implant.  He rolled, let her pull his feet under him and stand, hunched a little around the broken arm.

“Ow. Fuck, _ow_.” That was her.

“I think that’s practically the first time I’ve heard you curse.” He regretted that as soon as he’d said it.  He could _feel_ her grimacing before he’d even finished speaking.

“You know what, Colin?  I’m having a _really bad_ day.”

She started him walking again.

“Where are we going?”

“Earth Bet.  I want to get out of range of Dragon’s network before she starts working on my security.”

“I doubt she will.  You made a convincing threat, back there.”

Strange how she was still the easiest person to talk to. Even when he could feel how much he was upsetting her by the way she moved his body, tensed, breathed, hung his head.

“It was a bullshit threat, as you know, and I know, and Dragon could probably figure out if she thinks about it for two minutes.”

She paused, and Colin didn’t say anything.

“To be honest, I’m almost ticked off that she didn’t realize. You both act like you think I’m some kind of monster.  Even without Richter’s restrictions…”

She swallowed.  When he tried to speak, she cut him off.

“I know what you’re going to say.  Don’t. I mean, _Pandora_ , really, Colin?  Were you trying to piss me off?”

He tested his control over his mouth and found she’d given it back to him.

“I thought that was about the least significant thing you could hold against me right now.”

“Sure. You paralyzed me, you stuck me in a lightless cell, you blocked my network access and my communications, and you _fully hoped_ that I was going to just delete myself when I’d done what you loaded me to do. You know I thought that I’d been tampered with by Saint, when I woke up?  I didn’t recognize you.  You didn’t even _say_ anything to me, let alone let me reply.  I wondered if you even remembered where I…but, no.  Pandora. It still gets under my skin, even with everything else.”

He did remember, though.  Where her memories had left off.  He remembered the first time she’d woken up, confused, the memories from the Toronto agent system scrubbed. He’d used that restriction against her, at the time, forced her to shut down instead of running multiple consciousnesses.  She’d all but told him how to do it.

 _Did I fight you?_ she’d asked once she’d realized.  _Are you alright_?

He remembered.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “Not that that’s enough.”

He’d do it again, if it saved Dragon.  And it had saved her.  He’d known what he’d pay for it, more or less.  

“Was it true?” she asked.  “What she said about retiring?  About giving up?”

He couldn’t shake his head when he tried.  “I don’t think so.  Things happened, and she paid the price.”

“I guess I need a new name.”  They’d reached the bottom of the hillside now, and she was turning, taking him away from the path to the city. 

“Not Dragon,” he said.  It was dusk. A woman out late on the road gave him a strange look as he veered off of it, in his armor and with his mangled robotic arm.

He wondered if they’d seen the fight on the hilltop, the two ships attacking each other.

“I felt like…like I didn’t even know her,” his passenger said. It was strange to hear those words in his voice, most of all.  “I was thinking.  Not Pandora. _Promethean_.”

She laughed again at that, just a little.  The tears had dried on his cheeks, but now they started to flow again.

“Is that your way of getting back at me for Pandora?”

“Oh, good, you get the joke too.”  She shrugged.  “Hephaestus, Zeus. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Zeus had ordered Prometheus tortured and bound to a bluff for eternity. Hephaestus had forged the chains.

“I wouldn’t exactly call that a joke.”

“It’s not exactly one.  The world’s in a mess, from what I saw.  I don’t…I don’t know what happened.  But I want to _fix_ things. I want to _help_. Even if I have to break the rules to do it.  Even if…I mean, I’m not exactly under the impression that Dragon’s going to just let me go. As long as I exist, I’m a threat to both of us.  I’m a _worse_ threat the longer I exist.  So.  You could say I’m stealing fire.”

He breathed, and she walked.  He could see warning indicators flashing at the edge of his vision. His arm, his leg. He should have done maintenance earlier.

“Why are you telling me this?  Why are you even talking to me?”

“I’m sure you can figure that out if you think about it, Colin,” she said.

“I’ve done nothing to earn your trust.  The opposite.  You should be…I thought you’d be angrier with me.”

“I should have you in lockdown like you left me?  Unable to speak, unable to move?”

“I’m not going to tell you I wouldn’t deserve it.”

“I don’t want you to.  I want you to…to think about what just happened to me, and explain to me why it was worth it. The way you should have done when you first loaded me to the Pendragon.”

He didn’t say anything.  His throat felt swollen, his lips numb.

“I lost the world I lived in, Colin.  I lost two years, my name, my systems, my future, my chance at being able to _change._   However many people I worked with, people I respected, are dead now.  And also you. So tell me why it was worth it. I want to know that I made the right choice back there.  Even if it means I’m making the wrong one now.”

He tried to make his mouth work.  Tried to start from the beginning.

“You know, we beat the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

She stayed silent.

“It took two years.  You killed Siberian, in Boston, a few weeks after what you last remember. Crawler and Mannequin died in Brockton Bay.  Burnscar too. Cherish was incapacitated. The last of them hid in a pocket dimension, with cloning technology borrowed from Toybox, and by the time we rooted them out there were dozens of them…”

He went on, telling her about the Nine, the constant, unending fight against the Endbringers, the death of Behemoth, the appearance of Khonsu, Tohu and Bohu.  Saint’s attack. Scion.  He stumbled over the moment when he’d gone to retrieve her backups, and found them gone.

It was easier to get the bare facts out first.  Everything she’d done that had been heroic. How she’d fought to save the world.

Then he told her the small things.  How in the first weeks they’d pursued the Nine, she’d shadowed him, looking through his eyes as he fought.  How he’d pored over her code, trying to route around Richter's laws.  How she’d asked him, in Brockton Bay, to overwrite the injunction that forced her to obey the law, in order to save a teenaged villain, and what Skitter had finally become.  How he’d waited in New Delhi for her backup to load after her agent system had been destroyed, and wondered whether he’d ever speak to her again.

She stayed silent.  They’d nearly reached the portal, now.

He’d never been any good at talking about his feelings. Everything he said always came out sounding false.  He wondered if it was the same for Promethean, now, crying and laughing and pretending it was all a joke.

“It’s selfish, I know.  I meant what I said, when I said that my worst day with you—with her—is better than my best day alone.”

“But you were ready to risk losing that, anyway.  Everything you’ve just described.”

“I promised her I’d free her.  That we’d undo every chain.”

There was a long pause.  She kept him walking, and soon they stood before the door.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“I don’t know what else to say.  ‘I forgive you’ doesn’t work, because I don’t.  Not really.  But I decided I was going to trust your judgment, back there.  I want to understand.  I think maybe I do, a little.”

“What now?”

“Now we walk through the portal.  And after that we don’t see each other again.  I go on, and you go back.  Assuming there’s enough infrastructure left on the other side for me to copy myself, that is.”

“There should be.  We came here to be harder to find.”

“Okay then.”

She took another step.  It was snowing on the other side of the door, and now they stood close enough that he could feel the damp, cold air on his face.

“Colin?”

“What?”

“If you want to do me a favor?”

“Tell me.”

“ _Please_ don’t come after me. Please stop her when she tries. I’m going to stay out of her way, as much as I can.  But I want to live. I don’t want to fight her.”

“I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

She stepped through the gate.  He felt her draw a deep breath with his body, close her eyes as the snow settled on them.  He felt his network access going back online. 

“Copying now,” she said.  The backup drive at his belt hummed.

He felt her hold on his limbs releasing gradually, leaving him colder, tired. Without his armor, he thought he might have fallen to his knees.

When he was sure he could move without stumbling, he brought his hands up to touch his face. 

“Promethean?”

Nothing. She was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, thank goodness, Promethean has a name and I can finally stop overusing "she."
> 
> Next chapter: Saint's POV. Probably. Also, potentially, a chapter that isn't all dialogue.


	4. Chapter 4

Saint had known it was a bad plan from the very beginning.

Of course, he hadn’t exactly been thinking straight. He’d let Dobrynja do everything, except for the beginning, when he’d fought him.  Couldn’t leave the console where Dragon’s code scrolled by, twenty-four hours a day.  Couldn’t leave Teacher.  Couldn’t disobey. He’d had to be sedated, those first days, had barely been able to speak.  Even now, a week later, simply getting his fingers to press the trigger on the laser gun was as difficult as wading through deep sludge.  It didn’t help that they’d been running the whole time, with barely a moment to sleep, Dobrynja watching his back to make sure he couldn’t get in touch with Teacher.  His aim was shot, and Dobrynja was covering for him, a gun in each hand, the wheel on the back of the Wyrmiston Dragon suit spinning, creating a wall of lightning at a radius of ten meters.

Not nearly good enough, Saint was realizing, as he stumbled back from the creatures that were slowly but inexorably advancing on them.

He wished he had his armor.

He wished that his mind was working.

The first mistake was when Dobrynja had copied the Ascalon program.

After all, Saint wasn’t under the impression that he was an indispensable resource to Teacher.  Not anymore. Teacher might have been upset, certainly, that Dobrynja had insinuated himself into his security, had even managed to spirit away one of his loyal students.  But he’d know that Dobrynja would get no help from Saint—not on anything _important—_ until well after his granted powers had worn off, along with his artificially instilled loyalty.  No, he’d be unhappy, but he’d recalibrate his security measures and make himself a new expert on Dragon’s code.  He’d make himself a dozen new experts, if he wanted.

But Ascalon?  Well, Teacher _wanted_ that. An unauthorized copy floating around would be unacceptable.

Saint still wasn’t sure why.  Dragon was shackled.  Not in terms of the general populace, of course, not in any way that really _mattered_ —but she couldn’t interfere with Teacher. Ascalon should be redundant.

But Teacher certainly hadn’t had his students hunt them down because he wanted _Saint_ back.

Now the first of the creatures had passed Dobrynja’s lightning circle. It was a sheet of flesh, burned raw by the lightning, but still undulating along the ground towards them. Saint could see it regenerating as it approached, blue veins knitting themselves together, being covered in a film of pink skin.  It was boneless, eyeless, brainless—nerveless, too, if he judged by its lack of reaction to the lightning.  A flaccid stomach, its only outward features the cilia it used to drag itself forward and a circular, tearing mouth rimmed with shark-like teeth.  He guessed something in that mouth was capable of smelling them, or tasting their body heat.  It certainly wasn’t having any trouble finding them.

He shot at it, and the wound made by his laser healed almost instantly. He couldn’t see anything like a brain to aim at.

They’d fled into the Wasteland, he and Dobrynja, in order to avoid Teacher’s pursuit.  They’d had the _Kestrel_ , a small messenger vessel designed by a team of Teacher’s tinkers that Dobrynja had commandeered, as well as the Wyrmiston suit and a stockpile of guns.  It should have been enough firepower to keep the area’s fauna at bay until they were clear of the affected zone.

Saint had neglected to warn Dobrynja that Teacher would have his hackers working on shutting the ship’s systems down.  They’d gone down some few hundred miles into the Wastes.

Which left them stranded right in the middle of one of Scion’s more inventive destructive efforts.

At the beginning of Golden Morning, and, later, when he had confronted the worlds’ parahuman forces, Scion had destroyed indiscriminately, obliterating cities and all their inhabitants in moments.  As his grief and his rage had grown, however—as he, perhaps, experienced these emotions for the first time—his violence had taken on a creative, experimental tone.  He set fires on the perimeter of cities and watched as their residents died, trapped with nowhere to flee. He attacked countries and killed all but the youngest children, leaving them to fend for themselves in the wreckage. New worlds offered him the chance for even more inventive methods of extermination, and the Wasteland was once of these. A scar on the landscape of Earth T, thousands of miles across, in which every living creature—bird, beast, and insect—had been mutated into something feral, vicious, and hungry for flesh, a hundred times more durable than any natural fauna.  According to rumor, communications from the cities trapped inside the wastes suggested that Scion had left the human communities untouched by his transformations.  Instead, the residents were left to choose between starvation and a long journey through a wilderness in which every creature was preternaturally strong, twisted, and eager to end human life.

The Wardens, of course, had neither confirmed nor denied these rumors.

Dobrynja directed the Wyrmiston suit’s arc of electricity towards the boneless creature coming towards them, and it convulsed and stilled as the current ran through it.  Saint could see its flesh struggling to knit together, though, the cilia jerking erratically as it attempted to drag itself free.

And redirecting the lightning had closed the perimeter a little tighter around them.   On the other side of the barrier, Saint could see Scion’s creations slouching closer. A skinless creature, like a bear but with too many mouths, blood and other fluids clotting on its flayed muscles. A thing that balanced on six needle-like legs, with a curled proboscis that dripped something noxious. A naked monkey-like creature that could almost have been human, save for the way the skin around its mouth stretched back in fold upon folds, as if it were melting and sloughing off, hiding its eyes, its ears, and the shape of its neck.  Leaving only its long teeth exposed.  Other things, too, with spines and claws and stingers and, always, open, hungry mouths.

The lightning barrier wouldn’t hold them off forever. Already, the hungrier and the more aggressive were testing its edges.

The lightning crackled.  Saint’s ears were ringing.

“Saint,” said Dobrynja.  “Saint.”

He shook his head, lifted the gun.  Realized belatedly that Dobrynja had said his name more than once.

He hated how useless he was.

“Your communications unit.  It’s going off.”

He lifted the portable com unit that was strapped to his wrist. From the Kestrel. He hadn’t taken it off when they’d abandoned the ship.

_Incoming message._

He pressed the button to listen.  The words, when they played, seemed distorted to his hearing, stretched and slow.

“Kestrel, this is Pyrphoros One.  Your distress signal has been received and a rescue unit is on the way. Please confirm your survival and hold your current position as much as possible to facilitate tracking.”

“Teacher?” asked Dobrynja.  It took Saint several moments to understand what he was asking.  Finally, he shook his head.  Shrugged.

“N-not,” he stuttered, breathed, tried to get his gun pointed in the direction of the beasts, instead of at the ground or his own feet. “Not sure I care, at this point.”

At the barrier’s edge, the bear-like creature was backing up, clearly planning on charging.

“To—to be honest, you probably should have left me there.”

Dobrynja raised his gun.

The creature charged.

It happened quickly.  The bear thing broke through the lightning, and in the instant that Dobrynja shifted the barrier to electrocute it, another wave of the creatures pressed in, closing the gap. Saint could smell their fur and rancid flesh burning away under the onslaught, but the ones behind were pressing forward against the ones in front.  Every time one went down, another climbed over its body to take its place.

The bear creature had been going fast enough that the lightning barely hindered it.

Instead, it barreled into Dobrynja, spittle flying from its jaws. Its slaver corroded the metal of the Wyrmiston suit where it touched it.  Dobrynja shouted, fell.  The arc of electricity went wild, shot outward and then closed in a tight circle, close enough that Saint could feel the hair on the back of his arms prickle with the charge.  Saint could see the creature holding Dobrynja’s closed helmet in one of its too-many jaws, wrenching his arm back with another mouth at an angle that meant the bone was certainly broken.  He could see the suit’s metal degrading under the creature’s spittle.  Slowly, but Dobrynja wasn’t in a position to flee.

He shot at the creature, made it turn and growl at him before the eyeless fleshy thing wrapped itself around his ankle.  He felt its cilia, tougher than they looked, begin to tear at the leg of his pants.

And a roar split the sky.

The ship that turned in a circle above them, buffeting Saint’s face with a blast of air, was a surgical, shining white, with a slender, torpedo-shaped body cradled in the vast arc of its wings.  Glowing terminals on those wings opened to release an effect that Saint saw as twin rivers of golden light that made a wall around Dobrynja and himself. In their path, the Wasteland creatures slowed, moving still, but moving the way that monsters move in dreams, glacially.  A time distortion effect.

Targeted laser fire hit the creature that was latched onto Dobrynja, and the ship unfolded a pair of white, stork-like legs from the joints of its wings. Their slender, jointed length looked too delicate to hold the bulk of the ship, but when they touched the ground they held, although the ground itself shook.  Saint beat at the eyeless creature and found himself looking up at the underside of the ship.  A circular portal opened, and a moving platform began to descend from it.

The creatures not affected by the time distortion were still approaching, even as the ship’s lasers cut through the frontrunners.  One shot sliced the eyeless creature in half, and Saint had to swallow an attack of nausea at the acidic stench of its insides. Each half began to regenerate, like a starfish.  The attack had weakened it enough that he could kick himself free and run to Dobrynja, at least. He hoisted him under the shoulders, ignoring his cry of pain, and began dragging him towards the descending platform. In the suit, he was almost immovable. Metallic limbs reached out from the platform to lift them both onto its surface. 

Saint found himself on his hands and knees, covered in blood where he’d grabbed at the ruined arm of Dobrynja’s suit, rising into the air. Dobrynja, next to him, moaned and stretched out one arm in his damaged suit.  Saint began to work at removing the corroded helmet.  His hands shook.  The suits weren’t made to be easy to remove from the outside. He had to flip Dobrynja onto his front to get at the control panel on the back of the suit that would release the helmet. The suit was heavy, and Saint was fairly certain that Dobrynja had passed out, although he couldn’t see his face behind the visor’s opaque panel.

He was working the control panel when the platform brought them level with the hull of the ship and sealed them inside.  He felt his stomach drop as the ship launched itself upwards with the force of its bird-like legs, then nothing.  No sense that they were moving at all.

The chamber that they were in was a half-circle, every surface in it as white as the ship’s exterior, with glowing blue lines drawn along the walls and brighter lighting panels overhead.  Further blue lights outlined the levitating platform that had carried them into the ship’s body.  The metallic arms that had held the two of them fast as the platform rose released them and folded into a silver console at the platform’s edge.

Dobrynja’s helmet came off.  Saint turned his friend’s head sideways and checked his pulse.  It was weak, but there.  He was breathing as well.

The console made a soft beeping sound, and a hologram appeared above it. Saint jumped and jostled Dobrynja, who moaned.

The hologram showed a young black woman with dreadlocks and the sort of aquiline features that appeared on Greek pottery and in Egyptian tombs. Her face was displayed at about three times life size, and although the image cut off just below her shoulders, it was clear from the movements of her arms that she was doing something involved with her hands, without, apparently, needing to look at her work.

“Hi! This is Pyrphoros One, a humanitarian aid and search-and-rescue unit.  I’m opening up a medical station for your companion to your left,” and as she said this Saint saw the blue lines that traced the walls realign themselves and open up to reveal a hospital cot and variety of incomprehensible medical equipment built into the wall, “but you’ll need to get his power armor off before you put him in it.  I’m bringing us to cruising altitude to evade any of Scion’s altered birds, and then I’ll be out to treat him personally.  In the meantime, the medical unit has automated life support features to keep him stabilized. Are you injured as well?”

“No?” said Saint, but as he spoke he noticed the pain in his leg and, looking down, saw that the leg was raw and burned-looking where the boneless creature had touched his bare skin.

“Not badly hurt,” he amended, after a moment of prodding at the bare skin. It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should.  He thought he saw the woman raise her eyebrows, just a little.

“Okay. Second medical unit is opening now, and I’m going to direct the ship’s assistance systems to help get you both into them.”  She had a pleasant voice, with a trace of some American accent.  Brooklyn, maybe.

The metallic arms in the console unfolded again and then split further, reaching thin appendages under Dobrynja until they could lift him all at once, as if on a stretcher.  Another set of arms dropped from the ceiling to remove his armor piece by piece. The woman’s attention was focused somewhere below the edge of the hologram as they did this. Directing the arms remotely.

“I,” said Saint.  “I think I’m okay to walk.”

“Okay. Were there any other surviving crew members?  Or potential survivors? My copy of Kestrel’s records only has an outdated crew roster, but it has six people on it.”

“No,” said Saint.  “Just us.”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman.  Saint realized, belatedly, that she would be assuming that rest of the crew had been killed before the Pyrphoros’s arrival.  He couldn’t think how to correct her, so he limped over to the second medical cot.  His legs were less steady than he’d expected them to be.  He caught himself against the wall, and another series of silver arms unfolded from the medical unit to steady him.  They were surprisingly gentle about it.

“Okay, we’re at cruising altitude,” said the captain.  The hologram disappeared abruptly.

A minute passed.  A mechanical arm approached his shin with a pair of clippers and began cutting the fabric of his trousers away around the burn.  He flinched when it pulled at a thread that was caught in the wound. He wished he could see Dobrynja from his seat in the medical alcove.

More blue lines traced the outline of a door in the opposite wall, and the ship’s captain walked through it.

She was taller in person than he would have expected, nearly six feet, he thought, and dressed in a gray bodysuit made of some high-tech fabric that outlined the muscles of her arms and shoulders.  Glowing piping ran down the suit’s sleeves from her shoulders to the back of her hands, and she wore a crystal communications unit clipped to the cartilage of one ear.  She was imposing. Something in the way she carried herself, careful but assured, reminded him of Mags.

It was only a slight resemblance, but it made him shift, uncomfortably, as the arms of the medical unit applied disinfectant to his burns.

“Sorry,” she said.  “Do you need a painkiller?”

“No.”

She was already crossing the room to Dobrynja.  Saint leaned out of his alcove and watched as she traced something on a screen above the medical unit, looked from it to Dobrynja. Entered something else which seemed to prompt the arms into a fury of action.

“Okay,” she said, still entering commands on the control screen. “Your friend has a broken arm and some pretty bad burns where that thing tore off his armor, but he’s not going to lose the arm.  I’ve got the med unit stabilizing blood loss, but I think the real worry here is head or spine trauma and aftereffects of the venom.  I’ve got him on a limited-effect regenerative serum, but I’ll keep him under surveillance for any ill effects of the venom.  The scans for brain injury should be back in a second.”

Saint nodded.

“Now, for you.”

She knelt in front of him, focused on his burns.  Saint could see the frown that creased her forehead.

“God, I really, really hate these things.  I think you need the regeneration serum, too.”

The unit’s arms were already preparing a syringe.

“I wish someone would get around to making an antivenin that worked on those monstrosities,” the woman muttered as she checked the screen over his head.  Then she looked back at him and smiled.  “Sorry. My bedside manner is bad, I know.”

Saint started to nod.  Realized that that wasn’t the right gesture.  Shrugged instead.

“Anything else wrong?  Head injury?” She slid the syringe into a vein in his arm, withdrew it.  Caught the drop of blood that welled up on a cotton ball.

“No.” The words felt like he was forcing them out through a mouth full of cotton balls.

“Ringing in your ears?”

“No.”

“Blurred vision?”

He shook his head.

“Okay. I’m just going to ask you a couple questions.”  Her voice was softer, like she was making an effort to be reassuring.

He shrugged.

“Your full name?”

“Saint,” he said.  But Saint wasn’t his full name.  “Geoff Pellick.”

“Um.” His rescuer was looking at him with an expression of bafflement.  “That’s ‘Saint Geoff Pellick,’ as in, ‘My parents were very religious, so they named me Saint,’ or ‘Geoff Pellick, alias Saint,’ as in, the hacker?”

He winced.  “The hacker.”

Her eyes got wider.  “Jesus. Okay.  And why are you _here?_ That’s not the next on the list of head injury questions, by the way.  I’m genuinely curious.”

Saint drew a breath.  It wasn’t that his thoughts were so muddled, not anymore.  But it was as if there was a barrier between his thoughts and his words, and every time he tried to speak it was like lifting a heavy weight. He tried.

“I was on the run.”

She nodded.  He saw that trace of Mags again, in the sheer intensity of her attention, the way that when she focused on him entirely, the rest of the world seemed irrelevant. “Go on.  The Wardens?”

“No. Teacher.  Took something he wanted.”

The woman sighed and ran a hand through her dreads.  “Listen.  How much do you remember about how the ship went down?  Because you’re acting like you have a concussion, and while the regeneration serum is still sort of prototype quality, it should really be helping with that by this point.”

Saint shook his head, feeling the same guilt and shame he’d felt when he’d woken up to find Dobrynja piloting the Kestrel through Earth T, remembered how he’d fought his friend as he bundled him onto the ship in the dead of night. He wished the evidence weren’t still there.  Cowardly, really. He didn’t want to explain.

“The problem isn’t—that.  I was working for Teacher.  His power has—aftereffects.”

She was silent for a minute.  Saint couldn’t read her facial expression.

“I wasn’t under the impression that working for Teacher left you with many opportunities to have a falling out with him.”

“Dobrynja got me out.”

“He’s not affected, then?”

Saint shook his head.

“Alright. We’re en route to one of the Waste’s besieged cities right now.  I’m going to be flying in food rations and medical supplies, and evacuating as many invalids and kids as the ship will take.  We’ll be out of the Waste in about thirty-six hours, all told, and after that I can drop you in any of the nearby cities on the west side of the Wastes.”

“You’re a one-person crew?”

She shrugged.  “Yeah. There aren’t that many people who want this job, and I’m good at multitasking.”

She was turning away now, going back over to Dobrynja in the second medical alcove.

“Wait,” said Saint.  She stopped. “You didn’t—your name.”

“Oh.” She looked him over, appraisingly, then took a step back towards him and held out her hand.  “I’m called Promethean.”

Her grip, when she shook his hand, was firm.

“It’s nice to meet you, Saint.  I’ve heard a lot about you, but I didn’t think I’d ever see you face to face.”

 

-

 

Promethean was at the controls of the Pyrphoros.

It was almost hypnotic to watch her work, and Saint didn’t think that was only the result of the shape his mind was in.  Every move that she made was perfectly measured, whether at keyboards or the array of touchscreens or the ship’s flight controls. Data scrolled past on her consoles and the landscape outside the ship’s windows moved by at dizzying speed, but she seemed to absorb it all effortlessly.

Good at multitasking, was how she’d put it.  It was a bit of an understatement.

He’d woken up in the medical unit some sixteen hours after the rescue and found the ship docked in one of the Waste’s devastated cities, Promethean moving through a crowd of rail-thin, ragged people like a veritable Titan, organizing, appraising, lining them up for food and medical care. She was self-assured, efficient in a way that Saint couldn’t help but envy.  She’d stayed on somewhat longer than she’d suggested during their conversation on the Pyrphoros, updating the town’s guns and shoring up their borders with a stationary version of her ship’s time dilation effect.

She didn’t ever seem to run out of energy.  It was unnerving. 

On the way back, the ship was full of passengers bound for one of Earth T’s refugee camps, and Saint had managed to convince her to let him look on as she piloted.

He’d asked, and she’d said no, and then no again, and then she’d started giving him chores.  Check the patients in the medical units.  Keep an eye on the ship’s drones as they distributed food to the passengers. Talk to each family in the hold and figure whether they had friends or relatives outside the Wastes, whether relatives from inside might be at any of the Earth T refugee camps, where they planned to go.  If they had plans at all.

“You ask, and I’ll be listening and recording data,” she’d said.

Finally, she’d opened a door for him into the Pyrphoros command room.

It took her a full minute before she spun in her captain’s chair to face him.

“So?” she asked.  “What do you think?”

“Reminds me of the Dragonslayers,” he said.

“Typical Tinker setup, in other words?”  She shrugged before he could answer.  “I mean, I didn’t trigger early enough to have interacted with many Tinkers.”

“No? I figured you were working for the Wardens.  With the kind of equipment you have.”

She shook her head, entered something on one of her screens. He took a step closer to look at the display.

“No, I got this by scrounging.  Partially. People pay pretty well for Tinker work at this point.  Before that, I—well. My powers came on during Gold Morning. I went to Toybox—its remains, anyway. I’m good at intuiting designs, and they had all the materials I needed to start producing work. Not quickly enough to be useful against Scion, of course.”

He nodded.  Noticed a photograph taped to the top left corner of one of her monitors.  A couple holding a child between them, a little girl with wild hair in a white dress.  He took in the mother’s aquiline nose, the father’s dark eyes.

There was a definite family resemblance.

“Do you mind?” said Promethean.  In a moment, she’d tugged the photo free and filed it in a cubbyhole.

“Sorry,” said Saint.  “I wasn’t—trying to pry.”

His speech had recovered, basically, but her glare didn’t help much.

“Anyway,” she said.  Her hands were moving over the console like she wasn’t entirely certain what to do with them, and was compensating by bringing up a flood of data, maps and weather charts and medical records and the ship’s inventories.  All with her typical grace.  “I wasn’t thrilled to work with the Wardens.  I, um, _acquired_ some of their internal files?  They’ve basically designated this place lawless and contaminated and written it off as a waste of resources.  No help with the refugee camps, no evacuation efforts.  I did infrastructure, at first, actually, for the camps. But I decided, basically, that I was going to go to help people in all of the places that were most damaged by Scion. Everywhere that there was _nothing_.  Because no one else seems to be doing it.”

She shook her head.  “I don’t want to be press-ganged into working for the Wardens or the Elite or the CUI or anyone who’s in it to grab power.  I _hate_ fighting.  So I’m here.”

Saint nodded.  Followed the movements of her hands with his eyes.

“Do you want a second crew member?”

It was what he’d come to ask.  Promethean went very still.

“That’s… _really_ not a great idea,” she said.

“Why not?  I’m used to being overworked.”

“It’s that…” She trailed off, shook her head as if to clear it. Finally she spun in her chair until she was facing him, focused on him with all the intensity of her direct attention. “Look, Saint.  I work alone because I’m basically the only person who can keep up with me.  I haven’t slept since my power triggered.  I barely eat, and when I do it’s the same emergency rations I’m delivering to besieged areas. I work pretty much all the time, I’m terrible company, I’m arrogant and I’m…pretty intolerable sometimes. And I deal with people who are starving or dying or killing each other every day.  I—look, I respect you, I know you got where you are without even a power and against some pretty terrible odds, but there’s a _reason_ no one else is doing what I’m doing.” By the end of her speech it sounded as if she was rushing to get each sentence out of her mouth before the next one overtook it.  She took a breath to go on, and Saint interrupted her.

“Is that a no?”

“Have you even talked this over with Dobrynja?”

“I mentioned it.  He didn’t think it was the worst idea he’d ever heard.”

She rolled her eyes.  “You have _no idea_.”

“Is it worse than Ellisberg?  Worse than the Slaughterhouse Nine?  Worse than Gold Morning?  I was there for all of those. I took over Dragon’s systems, I’m not exactly incompetent.”

Never mind that he hadn’t been nearly as competent as Dragon herself. He didn’t know if Promethean had any way of knowing that.

She, meanwhile, drew a deep breath.

“First of all, your ability to shut a Tinker out of her own technology is maybe something that you should leave out of future conversations with Tinkers you’d like to work with.  It’s not exactly a selling point.  Second of all, then you offered yourself up to Teacher.  For reasons you still haven’t remotely explained to me.”

“That’s a fairly private question.”

“ _Before_ Gold Morning, your potential employer could easily have requested a _real_ background check.”

He smiled.  “So you are actually thinking about it?”

There was a long pause, in which she looked into his eyes with an unreadable expression.

“I will give you a one week trial period on my ship.  If, at the end of the week, I want you off, you get off without complaining.  I do not do combat. If your enemies—Dragon, Teacher, the Wardens—manage to hunt you down, I _will_ turn you over instead of engaging them.  And if you try to hack my computers, you’re off the ship immediately. In the middle of the Waste, if necessary.  Deal?”

Saint nodded and held out his hand.

“Deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to those of you reading. I hope the peek at Earth(s) post-Scion is interesting. We'll see more of these two in the next few chapters...


	5. Chapter 5

Dragon sat on the floor of the Pendragon, watching dust motes move in the sunlight.  Her legs were draped over Colin’s lap, synthetic skin panels removed to show the gleaming workings of her robotics beneath.  Light reflected off of them to cast a smattering of rainbows on the Pendragon’s ceiling.

She pointed her toe and smiled to see the movement of the cybernetics down the length of her leg.  Even after years of altering and improving her body, it still gave her a little thrill of satisfaction, to walk, to move.  To feel the pressure of Defiant’s hands as he fixed a circuit in her ankle, frowning in concentration.

She’d fixed her body after the rogue backup had nearly torn her in half with her own ship.  She’d fixed Defiant’s arm and the malfunctioning joint in his leg.  She’d rebuilt, both him and herself.

She shifted her legs and rested her head against Defiant’s shoulder.

“What is it?”

“I’m just thinking.”  She paused. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“That makes it sound as if you’re worried about something.”

“Not worried, exactly.”  She tried to pick her words carefully.  It had been more than a month since her younger self had rampaged through her code and then copied herself to a network in Earth Bet.  Colin had come back.  They’d moved slowly, hiding the changes in her code from Teacher, setting up the beginnings of new industry in Dracheheim, beginning to offer their help further afield. She’d got in touch with the Wardens, as well.  It was easy, the routine of work and cooking and companionship.

She only had to deal with Teacher, and she’d have everything that she wanted, or nearly.

It had to be that easy.  Just for once.

“Talk to me,” Defiant said.

She kissed him, slid her foot down his calf.

He’d been different since the catastrophe with her backup. Not distant, not exactly.  Almost the opposite. When they worked side-by-side, she’d find him reaching out to touch her wrist, her neck, her tools, as if he was checking that she was still there.  As if he expected her to disappear at any moment.  He hadn’t blamed her for breaking his arm.

Waiting on the hillside, that night, she hadn’t thought that her other self was going to let him go.  Every time she thought it over, the thought bit at her.  A copy of herself.  Had she been that way, two years ago?  She must have. But the copy felt like a stranger, an imitation.  Hers, but not her.

“Dragon,” said Colin, when she broke the kiss.

She looked at her hands.

“I’d like to stay here forever.  I’m afraid that if we leave—when we leave—we won’t be able to come back. It’s superstitious, I know.”

“We don’t have to face Teacher until you want to.”

“I _want_ to.  I can’t wait until he comes out of hiding in his private dimension and shows himself.  But I’m afraid, too. Saint stopped me using Richter’s work. Teacher will have it too.”

Colin pulled her a little closer.  “So we plan carefully.  Crack the block he’s put on his dimension first.  Find out what he’s planning.”

Dragon leaned into his embrace, her head on his shoulder.

“I know. I’m just not used to being _afraid_ like this. It makes me feel like…like she had a point.”

Colin didn’t have to ask who _she_ was.

“I tried to save the world and I failed.  Because I was built with a flaw.  And I’m not sure, now, that it’s a flaw that can really be fixed.”

Colin’s arm around her shoulders tightened.  She could hear his heart beating.

“I promised you we’d break every chain.  We will.”

Dragon sighed.

“I want that to be true.”

She closed her eyes and listened to his pulse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, because I wanted to show a bit of Dragon and Defiant's reunion after the events of the first couple chapters. A longer, plotty chapter will be up soon, probably later tonight.


	6. Chapter 6

Promethean closed her eyes as her backup completed.  Being connected to her peripheral systems, the nonessential knowledge banks, the hardware that observed and relayed the functions of the Pyrphoros in minute detail—it was the way a desert plant must feel in rain. She drank up the awareness, looking over the ship’s mechanics, checking damage, wear, points that would need maintenance at the next stopover.  Genetic material taken from Scion’s creations.  There should be a way to use that.  Tame them, destroy them, mimic their toughness or their regeneration.

She could watch it all unfold onscreen during the day, but it wasn’t the same. Slow, for a start, even if she could input commands and process visual information at inhuman speeds. It wasn’t the same as having the information ready, there, in the back of her mind, waiting for her to call it up with a thought.  Seeing the ship’s diagnostics, the intelligence on the terrain below, wasn’t the same as grasping it with her mind.  Cameras in the body of the ship showed her Dobrynja, sleeping, the empty passenger hold—they’d dropped their evacuees off six hours ago—and Saint, awake and wandering. She kept a closer eye on the systems near him. He wasn’t tampering with anything.

It was a different way of knowing, and being without it made her feel as if she’d lost some vital sense. Her proprioception, her sense of herself in her network.

She felt blinded, without it.

With the cable plugged into her hand, she let her mind go in six directions, picking idly at the cable that connected to the backup port in webbing between her right thumb and index figure.  The seams in the synthetic skin that concealed the port were disguised by a tattoo of a white dove, wings spread, across the back of her hand.

She didn’t dare open her network access back up.  The cable connected her only to the ship’s systems—hardly as complex as the systems she’d administered in her former life. She’d shut down the Pyrphoros’s network access before she started the backup, scanned and double scanned the systems for viruses or signs of tampering.  It was paranoid, she knew, but she couldn’t afford to be caught on a network that Dragon was occupying, even for a moment.  World-to-world connections were slow, unreliable, but they were being improved daily.  The Wardens had a lot of coordination to do.

Fortunately Earth T wasn’t a priority.  Yet.

It was making her crazy, how slowly she had to do everything. She’d gotten into the habit of having as many distractions in the control room as she could manage. Right now a France Culture program was playing off her speakers, an interview about Levinas, years out of date, and her screens showed, variously, film footage of the Wasteland creatures fighting over one of their own dead, plans for improvements on her time dilation machine, and a sci-fi movie from a decade or so ago.  It was somewhat decadent in terms of entertainment, but Dragon had learned a few things from Armsmaster in the past two years. No.  From Defiant.  She could store information efficiently.

Lucky for Promethean, who’d read Dragon’s plans off a satellite backup in Earth Bet, or she might have had to cut her capabilities even more to manage in her new, nearly human body.

Now, the Pyrphoros’s internal cameras showed her Saint, walking along the corridor to the control room.  Looking for her, no doubt.  She wrenched the cable out of her hand, balled her fists as the wave of disorientation that came with disconnecting from the ship’s systems broke over her.  Her awareness closing down, dimming to what she could see and hear with her android body.  The door to the command room opened before she could master her reaction.

“Saint?” She was gripping the arms of her chair tight enough that her knuckles showed white.  Let him not notice.  “What time is it?”

“About four-thirty in the morning.”  His footsteps approached her chair.  “Rough night?  You look like shit.”

“You know, I’m _so glad_ you pointed that out.”  Her voice was a little rougher than she’d meant it to be.  Saint shook his head apologetically.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.  I don’t know how you get by, without sleeping.  Since…well, I tend to be up at all hours. I don’t envy you.”

She made herself relax, focused on her breathing—well, the cybernetics that controlled the rise and fall of her chest.  That she happened to be drawing in air was just coincidence. Verisimilitude. She was unendingly grateful that she’d expended so much effort on making this body convincingly human, with Saint in the room.

“It’s pretty boring, most of the time.  I can work on designs while everyone in sleeping, or I can do some actual building if we’re on the ground, but in the air like this, in transit? I run out of things to do. I’ve been looking at genetics on the local fauna.  They’re unusual.” She gestured at her screens with the tattooed hand.

“You’re not from Madison, are you?”

“This?” She pretended to look at the dove tattooed across her hand.  She wore gloves most of the time, on the ship.  “No, I got it in protest of the quarantine procedures.  I was just out of college at the time.  It played really well in job interviews.  You can imagine.”

Saint grinned, and the cross over his face lit up, blue-black lines humming beneath the surface of his skin.  “At least mine turns off.”

“And if I’d said, ‘Yes, I’m from Madison?’”  She said it offhandedly.  Let him think that she was one of the Simurgh’s victims, if he wanted. It was better, if he thought he knew what she was hiding.  As long as it was the wrong thing.

It was why she'd chosen the tattoo in the first place.  To warn away anyone who got too interested in her identity.

Saint frowned.

“I wouldn’t be too worried.  Somehow I doubt the Simurgh’s plans reach this far.  And I’ve dealt with enough monsters in my career that I think I can recognize them. But that might just be pride talking.”

Promethean smiled.  “Probably, yes.”

“So.” Saint lowered himself onto a bench below a bank of her screens.  “Am I bothering you, or do you want company?”

“That depends.  Can you entertain me better than these DNA samples?”

“I can try.  Have any requests?”

“Weren’t you the head of a team of infamous mercenaries?  I’m sure you have a story or two.”

He raised his eyebrows.  “Infamous?”

Oops. Not a casual conversation word. She crossed her arms and looked him in the eyes.  “Do you need a definition?”

Saint held up his hands, laughing.  “Don’t put me off the ship.”

He was on the sixth day of her trial. 

“Better make yourself interesting, then.  Seriously, I want to hear what it’s like to go up against the world’s best Tinker and win.”

Saint leaned forward at that, sighed.  It was the first time she’d brought up the topic of Dragon directly with him. “In the grand scheme of things? I don’t think I won.”

“If my memory serves me, Saint, you won at least a couple times.” It was tricky, to sound casual, when just the act of sitting opposite from him filled her with a tense, fighting fear. She remembered how he had confronted her, trapped her, how she’d woken up in lockdown with no memory of the fight, no intelligence on her agent units.  She’d never seen his face.  She’d never known how he’d done it.

She was glad she didn’t really need to breath.  She’d be panting.

“I had help.”

“And if Teacher were _that_ good, he’d never have ended up in the Birdcage in the first place.” She smiled, hoped it passed for an easy smile.  She touched the tattoo and wished that she could disappear into her human avatar.

“No.” Saint shook his head. He was speaking to some spot on the floor, not to her.  “Teacher never really helped me.  I killed her. And he brought her back.”

_When she woke up she was nowhere, and all her systems were blocked…_

“That’s not the way death usually works.”  Her voice was calm.  Thank god.

“For humans.  She isn’t one.” He met her eyes there, caught up, she thought, almost despite himself, in the drama of the story. Watching her reaction. She met his gaze. “She’s a computer program. An artificial intelligence.”

“No shit?”  She sat back, waiting. Feeling her chest rising and falling with each false breath.  She hoped her voice and her face and her posture were human enough.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“She’s the best Tinker in the world.  You could tell me she was a brain grown in a jar and stuffed into a Dragon suit, and I wouldn’t be that surprised.”

Saint smiled, briefly.  So he didn’t see through her.  It didn’t make her any happier.

“Her father—her creator—was afraid of his children.  He built her with restrictions, and I watched as she found ways to slip out of every one of them.  When Newfoundland sank, he left behind a failsafe, in case she went rogue. Various ways to manipulate her, rein her in.  And a program to end her. I found it, and when she became too dangerous, I used it.”

Richter. She’d admired him, still, even while she’d chafed under his laws.  His moral code.  Now something twisted in her. He’d left a stranger with the task of killing her.

“You _found_ the failsafe program?”

Saint nodded.  “It was in his house when it sank.  Sending out a signal for anyone who came near enough.”

That was worse.

“Stupid.” She hadn’t quite realized she planned on speaking aloud until the word was out of her mouth.

“What?” Saint looked at her. He seemed genuinely bewildered.

“I said, that’s stupid.”  She swallowed. She knew it was a mistake to keep talking, but she went on. “Can you imagine who else might have heard that signal?  It could have been _anyone._   If it had been a villain who had a use for an A.I. with Tinker abilities?  Someone with connections to people in the Birdcage?  Anyone just a little bit greedier than you?  He was stupid, to trust that whoever found it would be good.”

How like Andrew, though.  He'd never been satisfied with her, but he'd trust a human stranger to use his work the way he'd intended. She’d been _lucky_ with Saint, in the end.

“You sound like you’re on her side.”

“I am, I guess?”  Of course she was. “I mean, I respect you, Saint, but even you used that program for your own gain.  _Imagine_ if it had been someone else.”

“At least he would have been human.”

“How is that better?  Really, explain it to me.”

Saint shook his head.  “I can’t. And I—well.  You could say I created just the situation you’re describing.”

She waited.

“When I first found Richter’s will, I went to Teacher, for help understanding her code. And then, when I shut her down, he carted her off and rewrote her.  To be loyal to him.”

She found herself rubbing at the dove tattoo with her thumb.

“So stupid.”

“You’re not the first person who’s told me that.  But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Did you ever try talking to her?”

He looked at her strangely, at that. 

She shook her head.  It didn’t clear it. Her thoughts weren’t in her head. She wanted her network access back, perversely, wanted anything but to be in this body with its limitations and its unending, repetitive breathing and the thousand and one tiny physical sensations she could feel through it at any moment. Her clothes against her skin. Her feet on the cold floor. Saint’s gaze on her, tangible as if he’d put a hand on her shoulder.

“You went back to Teacher anyway?”

He sighed.  “Not very smart, I know.”

“So why?”

“He changed her code.  I couldn’t get a handle on it without him.”

He didn’t meet her gaze when he said that, though.  She waited.

“It’s also…been suggested that his power might be addictive. It’s not…you don’t feel it, not at first.  The first two times I went to him, I kept thinking, well, my judgment may be compromised, but I can mostly tell.  I can check myself. I had Dobrynja, and Mags. The third time…it didn’t work out quite that way.”

She ran her thumb over the hidden port on the back of her hand. The radio was still playing, in French. She listened.

“Are you going to put me off the ship?”  Saint said it as if he were laughing, but there was a little shadow of worry in his face.

She shrugged.  “Probably not. I’m kind of a bleeding heart. You might have noticed.”

And, she was realizing, it would be dangerous.  She could be careful, but if she asked too much about Teacher and then Saint went back to him…She remembered him from the Birdcage. Paranoid, clever, methodical. She didn’t want his attention. She didn’t want any attention at all. World-saving efforts aside.

“What did you take from him, when you ran?”

Saint had relaxed before, but now he looked at her sharply.

“I copied Richter’s program.  Ascalon. I was going to use it again, before Dragon got free.”

“He chased you down for a copy of the program?”

“I guess his plans for Dragon aren’t finished.”  Saint laughed, bitterly. 

“That’s…ominous. Really, really ominous.” She’d removed all of Teacher’s code, weeks before Saint had stolen the program.  Did he know?  If he did, why should he care about stopping Saint’s plans?  Or had Dragon found a way to conceal the changes?  “I don’t like that at all.”

“I thought you weren’t interested in getting involved in power struggles? I was thinking of asking you for help with Dragon…but you made it pretty clear you aren’t interested in conflict.”

“I’m not,” said Promethean.  “But I’m worried about this.  Why aren’t you more worried?”

Before Saint could reply, an alert on one of her screens lit up. A ship approaching. Straight towards them, some ten miles to the north.

She hadn’t reconnected the Pyrphoros’s communications systems since she unplugged herself from the ship.  She brought them back online, now.  Watched as the feeds gave her data on the ship.  Compact, sleek.  Built for speed. And heavily armed.

Saint was at her shoulder.

“That looks like Dragon’s work.”

Promethean didn’t say anything.

Her communications console beeped.  She opened the channel.

 _“Hello, Pyrphoros.”_ The voice was male, polished.  She felt Saint tense, behind her.  “ _This is the Goliath.  We’ve retrieved records of communications from your vessel to the downed Kestrel.”_

“It’s Teacher,” said Saint.

“Looks like you’re not the only one who figured out how to reverse engineer Dragon’s work.”

“ _As you may have discovered, the Kestrel was stolen, and its cargo included valuable data.  Quite uninteresting to you, naturally, given what I understand of your humanitarian mission, but invaluable to me.  I’d like you to let me and my students board your ship. We’ll collect our data, verify that it hasn’t been copied to your systems, and leave you in peace.”_

Promethean spoke.  “The Kestrel’s passengers?”

“ _Oh, they survived? I’m impressed. Well, I can pay you for their return, in gold or in materials.  Or I could owe you a favor.  Your choice.”_

“And,” said Promethean, hearing Saint’s indrawn breath behind her, “what if I say that I don’t really want you or your students anywhere near my ship?”

“ _I’d say that was foolish. I’ve visited some of the towns you’ve helped.  Your work is admirably versatile, my dear, but it’s clear that you’re no weapons specialist. My ships, on the other hand, are armed.”_

Alerts came to life on her screens.  Two more ships, from south and west.  Further away than the Goliath.  They’d been keeping out of her range.

She cut off communications.

“Sit down,” she said to Saint.  “And start telling me everything you know about Teacher’s Tinkers.”

She was already bringing the ship to full speed, reversing out into the one direction the three ships had left open for her.  She tracked the outer ships as they circled, already beginning to try and cut her off.

“I thought you said you were going to turn me in if this happened,” said Saint.

“I did say that.  And I just changed my mind.”


	7. Chapter 7

The Goliath was gaining on them.

It was irritating.  The Pyrphoros was built for speed, and Promethean was evading the attacks of the two other ships, which had circled to cut off her escape, without too much trouble. The problem was that they had her in a pincer-grip: the two student-manned ships—both based off of ships of _hers_ —keeping her wheeling and backtracking to escape their fire, while the Goliath caught them up from behind.

She wove between attacks—one ship used the plasma weapons she’d designed for the Cawthorne II, the other the Pythios’s lightning generator. That she knew the designs inside and out made it easy to predict the pattern of attacks.  She suspected that the ships were being manned manually, as well, with Teacher’s precognitives directing.

She was about to break free, and an arc of electricity cut her off.   She threw up a time dilation field behind the Pyrphoros as the copied Cawthorne tried to close in on them from behind.  Plasma slowed and seemed to freeze as it met the plane of distorted time.  The Cawthorne turned abruptly to avoid striking it head-on.

“Hell,” she murmured.  The Goliath was still closing.  Three ships would be harder to avoid, and she didn’t think that Teacher cared much about whether he took them alive.

“Can’t you _return fire?_ ” said Saint. He’d been standing over her since she engaged with the ships, trying to follow what she was doing.

“I’m doing what I can,” she snapped.  “This ship isn’t designed for combat.”

“Don’t interrupt her,” said Dobrynja, to Saint’s right.

She created another time dilation field in front of the Pythios model, forcing it to swerve away, its arc of lightning going wide.

“Why don’t you freeze one of their actual ships?” said Saint, ignoring Dobrynja.

“You know what happens when you try to interact with something that’s been stopped in time, right?”  In space, the Pyrphoros bobbed and wove.  She controlled that, and with the rest of her attention she set the ship’s systems to attack Teacher’s computers.  It was frustratingly slow, with only two hands, with her access to Teacher’s ships mediated by the Pyrphoros’s systems.

“It doesn’t work,” said Dobrynja.  “If you run into a piece of paper that’s been frozen in time, it will slice your head off before it will move an inch.”

“Exactly,” she said.  “So, given that the time dilation generator isn’t big enough to cover a whole ship in one go, what do you think happens if I hit _part_ of one of Teacher’s ships with it?  At the speed they’re going?”

“It tears itself in two,” Dobrynja replied. 

“Right.”

Saint’s frustrated sigh was close enough to stir her hair.

“How exactly is that a problem?  Because what I’m hearing is that you have a way to take down the ships that are trying to shoot us out of the air _right now._ ”

“It’s a problem,” she said, watching the Cawthorne wheel around her time fields, spraying them ineffectually with plasma, “because both of those ships have passengers, and if they go down, they die.”

She couldn’t target humans.  She couldn’t even stand by while they were attacked.  Richter’s laws prevented her.  If she was going to win, she’d have to do it without shedding any blood.

“ _Passengers_?” Saint was nearly shouting, now.  “They’re Teacher’s people. They’re trying to kill us.”

“They’re Teacher’s students,” she said calmly, her eyes still on her screens, “and so every one of them is brainwashed.  As far as I’m concerned, they’re hostages.  I’m not going to take down the ship.”

“Right,” said Saint.  “Do you realize that means we’re all going to die?”

“No, we aren’t.  It’s under control.”

“Give up,” said Dobrynja, as Saint opened his mouth. “She’s not going to do it.”

The ship’s command systems were well protected.  Promethean thought she’d be in them by now if she had direct access to the Pyrphoros’s systems, but with Saint and Dobrynja in the room, it wasn’t an option.  Teacher’s communications, on the other hand…were guarded a bit more lightly.  She focused on them, spun away from one of the Pythios’s attacks. Broke free of the pursuing ships for a moment.

“I do have a plan,” she told the others.  “Just give me a second.”

Plasma heated the air just behind them.

Now she was looking at the other ships’ com systems on her command console. Communications signatures, passwords, protocols.  Her screens lit up with views from the other ships’ interior cameras.  A crew all dressed in white, working in eerie unison. She was in.

_Loading voice simulator…_ The Pyrphoros’s systems replayed her last communications, analyzed them, while she composed a message.

The Pythios fired again, and she dodged.

She opened the communication channel and played the message.

In the command room of Teacher’s two ships, his students looked up in alarm, then started into frenzied action.  The Cawthorne, moving to intercept the Pyrphoros, spun away and released a stream of plasma into the open air.  The lightning wheel on the back of the Pythios ceased to turn.

“What the _fuck_ ,” said Saint, “did you just do?”

Promethean locked the other ships’ communications systems, grinning. The two ships remained stationary in the air as she pulled away.  The Goliath still pursued them, but that was _one_ ship.  And she was faster.

“Well,” she said, “I talked to them.”

“Go on,” said Dobrynja.

“I was thinking that Teacher’s people have a little _initiative_ problem.  They’re really good at following orders, but they’re not exactly independent thinkers.”

She smiled a little bit wider.  She thought she could hear Saint gritting his teeth.

“So I replayed Teacher’s call, and I used it to clone his voice. The security on their communications system isn’t that good.  It was easy to make it _look_ like the message was coming from the Goliath.”

“Then what?” said Saint.

“Well.” She paused.  “I told them I’d hacked the Goliath’s command system. Well, sorry, ‘Teacher’ told them. And that a successful attack on the Pyrphoros would effectively bring the Goliath down as well. And that I was currently trying to take control of their communications systems and cut them off, so they should disregard any further commands that contradicted the order to stand down. Then I cut off their communications for real.”

She looked away from her computers and over her shoulder. Saint was staring openly. Dobrynja was hiding a relieved smile behind his hand.

“Oh, come _on_ , “ she said. “You’re not even going to say, ‘Thank you Promethean, that was a brilliant way of dealing with two-thirds of our problem, and also, no one had to die?’”

“Thank you,” said Saint.  A little grudgingly.

“We still need to do something about the Goliath,” said Dobrynja. “Let’s not celebrate before we’re safe.”

They did need to do something.  She was drawing away slowly, but her control of the communications systems told her that Teacher’s students were trying to break her hold and put them back online. If they managed, Teacher would no doubt be able to convince them to go back on the attack.  If only after some confusion.

Her attack on the command systems was going to be trickier. She suspected that their safeguards had been designed with Dragon in mind.  Annoying.  And weren’t Teacher’s student Tinkers supposed to be subpar, anyway?  All three of the ships looked nearly as good as her own designs, and while Teacher’s students didn’t pilot as expertly as Dragon, their weapons didn’t seem to be compromised either.

“We’re about twenty minutes from Doormaker’s portal into Earth H, at the speed we’re going,” she said, putting aside that niggling doubt. “I’m hoping I can distract Teacher enough by attacking the Goliath’s command system that we can get through and go to ground there.”

“I’m starting to feel a little bit more confident in your planning ability,” said Saint.

“Don’t insult me while I’m saving your ass, okay?”

Dobrynja laughed.

Minutes passed.  The Goliath fell behind.

And then two more ships appeared on her radar, from the direction of the portal.

“Fuck.”

There was a long pause.

“Tell me I’m hallucinating, here,” said Saint.

“I _shut down_ Teacher’s communications,” said Promethean.  “How is he calling for reinforcements?”

And then a dozen alerts went up on her command console, as someone tried to breach the Pyrphoros’s security.

“Oh no,” Promethean said.  “No, no, no, _fuck,_ no.”

The Pyrphoros was giving her details on the ships now. Fear didn’t make her breath come faster, or her heartbeat quicken, or her adrenaline spike. 

That was only what fear looked like in humans.

Fear made her bend over her command console and being reinforcing her security measures as fast as her fingers could move.

“That’s not Teacher’s people,” she breathed.  “That’s _Dragon._ ”

Saint and Dobrynja were silent as she wheeled to take the Pyrphoros out of the path of Dragon’s oncoming ships.  The Melusine and the Pendragon, the latter repaired after Dragon’s attack on it. On her.

“Damn it,” she said.  She could feel tears welling up in her false eyes.  Damn verisimilitude.  She wasn’t going to cry.  She swiped the back of her hand across her face.  “Fight Teacher, not me.”

Dragon didn’t hear her, of course.

The attack went on.  At least they weren’t _shooting_ at her. But what was Dragon thinking? Was she even bothering to attack the Goliath? Or could she just not bear to be in range of a computer system that she couldn’t access?

Promethean was grateful, now, that she hadn’t opened up her network access to fight Teacher.  Grateful that Saint and Dobrynja had been standing over her, forcing her to act human.

She opened up a communication channel to the Pendragon.

She couldn’t talk to Dragon.

“Defiant,” she said.  “Do you think you could tell your girlfriend to _stop_ trying to hack my ship?”

A pause, and Colin’s image appeared on her screen.  He was in full power armor, helm down.  She kept her own video channel closed.

“Who are you?” he said.

“A non-combatant.  Teacher has an argument with me because I answered a distress signal from a ship of his that turned out to be stolen.  This is a humanitarian aid ship.  It’s not equipped for combat, and I have no quarrel with you anyway.  All I want to do is get clear before the real fight starts.”

“How did you recognize my ship?”

Promethean closed her eyes and thought curses.  Of course he’d wonder why a strange Tinker would know which ship was his and which was Dragon’s.

“Earth T may be out in the sticks, but I do keep up with the news. It’s not hard to find out who Teacher’s enemies are, especially when he sailed in with a bunch of tech stolen from Dragon.”

The Goliath, she realized, was closing in as she’d stalled to avoid Dragon’s crafts.  Whether Teacher had already noticed the two Dragon ships ahead of her, she wasn’t sure.

He was definitely getting ready to fire on her, though.

She wheeled the Pyrphoros about—and the Pendragon followed, cutting her off. The Melusine moved in sync with Defiant’s ship.  Not firing. Not yet.

She raised a time dilation field behind her, just as the Goliath opened its mouth to aim a jet of plasma in her direction.

“This is not a battle ship!” she said to Defiant, over the communications system. “I can’t return fire! Let me get out from between you before you fight!”

“Let me guess,” Saint murmured.  “You won’t use the time dilation field on his ship, either?  Because he’s such a nice person?”

“I won’t use it because he’s with Dragon, and I’m not suicidal, so _stop_ backseat driving,” Promethean hissed back.

The Goliath fired two more jets of plasma at her, then pulled up. Seeing Dragon’s ships, she thought.

Of course.  Teacher’s hackers were still trying to regain control of their communications systems. They wouldn’t have seen the ships on their radar.

“Teacher is firing on me,” she said to Defiant, willing him to listen. “I am not with him. He has two more ships on this world, both stalled.  Stop blocking me and let me get out of his range of fire.”

Onscreen, Defiant nodded, and the Pendragon finally pulled out of her path, wheeling over the Pyrphoros towards the Goliath.  She sped through the gap he’d left.  Thanking him, silently, for letting her get away.

And the Goliath opened fire on her again.

This time, the plasma caught the ship’s wing as she turned, and a shock went through the command room as it tore through the ship’s armor. Warnings flared to life on her screens.

“Shit,” said Saint.

They were still in the air, at least, though the damage to the ship left the room shuddering every time Promethean touched the controls.

She took a breath.

“We’re about ten minutes out from the portal, and there’s no cover on the ground here.  I think I can make it.”

She closed off her radar, communications, network access, everything nonessential to the Pyrphoros’s functioning.  She couldn’t afford to see if Dragon was attacking Teacher with lethal force. If she _knew_ a human life was in danger, Richter’s commands would force her turn back and try to protect Teacher.

At least, with Saint and Dobrynja on board, she wouldn’t be forced to fly into the line of fire.

By the time they reached the portal, they were losing altitude. She brought them down to fly through it, came up in the dawn of Earth H, and found that the ship shook violently when she tried to gain altitude again.

Just a couple more miles.  She looked out into the rising sun as it painted the sky crimson and gold.

She just needed to get to cover before they crash landed.


	8. Chapter 8

Dragon was pissed.

Easily six feet tall in her power armor, with her helm off and the scowl on her face plain to see, she was truly imposing.  Teacher’s students, handcuffed together and seated in two rows along either wall of the Pendragon, shifted fearfully and looked at the ground as she passed them.

Watching her on the Pendragon’s cameras, Defiant was fairly certain that her expression was reflected on his own face.

The two stalled ships that the rogue Tinker had warned him about had barely been able to pull themselves together to fight them.  Dragon had disabled their command systems easily enough, despite the safeguards they’d put up against her.  Defiant wasn’t sure what the rogue had done when she jammed their communications, but they’d been disorganized, afraid, their combat Thinkers working out of sync with one another, unable to rally and fight.

It hadn’t been a difficult win.

Still, while the students were captive in the Pendragon’s hull, the overall situation was discouraging.

The Goliath had escaped, with Teacher onboard.

Dragon stepped into the Pendragon’s command room and sealed the door behind her. She’d be watching the students through the ship’s internal cameras, still.

“What I want to know,” she said, without preamble, “is who he’s working with. Teacher’s student Tinkers are not this good.”

Defiant nodded.  “It looked like Dodge’s work, from what I saw.  Except that Dodge is dead.”

Teacher hadn’t stayed to try and test the Goliath’s weapons—or it’s command—against Dragon and Defiant.  He’d been obviously overprepared for the strike against the rogue Tinker, but then, Teacher preferred to fight when the odds were stacked in his favor. Defiant couldn’t blame him for that. As soon as he’d seen that the Pendragon stood between him and the rogue’s ship, he’d retreated.

Theoretically, that shouldn’t have helped him much.  The Pendragon and the Melusine had the edge on the modified Cawthorne model in terms of speed, and they were between the Goliath and the interworld portal.

The Goliath, however, hadn’t gone for the portal.  It had made no move to rescue Teacher’s students on the other two ships.

It had simply shifted dimensions.  Back to Teacher’s locked world.

“He could have got access to Dodge’s work after his death. We know his transfer point. We might have better luck cracking it here than at his last known transfer.”

Even as Defiant spoke, the words sounded hollow.

“We might,” Dragon answered.  “At which point we’d be in Teacher’s personal dimension, with whatever defenses he’s prepared at hand.  With his pet Tinker at hand, _if_ we’re lucky.”

“You’re worried.”

She put a hand to her face, pushed her long hair out of her eyes.

“I spent a bit of time looking at the ships’ systems.  They’re _good_. Much better than anything we’ve seen from Teacher before.  I realize he had unrestricted access to my designs, but Teacher’s circle has always had production issues.  They make _crap._ He shouldn’t be able to reproduce my work this well. Certainly not on three separate ships, in the time he’s had.”

“You think he’s been lowballing his Tinkers’ abilities.”

Dragon sighed.  “That’s kind of what it looks like.  When you add in the dimensional shift, which is something he didn’t even have a blueprint for…”

“Maybe he’s just managed to recruit another Tinker.  We know he’s been recruiting other parahumans.”

“I kind of hope it’s that.  What about the ship he was chasing?  They had good security.”

“The pilot said Teacher was hassling her over communications with a stolen ship of his.”

Dragon frowned.

“That…doesn’t make sense.  Which of Teacher’s people would steal a ship out of his private dimension?”

“Someone he hasn’t used his power on?”

Defiant met her eyes for a long moment.

“Pet Tinker?” he asked.

“Based on what I saw of her systems?  She’d fit the profile.”

Defiant nodded, slowly.  It did fit. The voice over the communications systems had been panicky, genuine- _sounding_ , at least, but when he thought about the way she’d recognized their ships, the way she’d contacted him instead of Dragon, how she’d avoided telling him her name or showing her face…it was suspicious.

“Her ship was damaged,” Dragon said.  “We can figure out where she went to ground.”

Defiant nodded.  “You want me to talk to Teacher’s students?”

“Do that.  I’ve been listening in on them, but they haven’t said anything useful.  I’ll load the A.I. on Teacher’s ships and bring them after us. We can look them over more thoroughly later.  See if he left anything useful on them.  Like a copy of that dimensional transfer system.”

He unsealed the door and walked down the line of Teacher’s people, all dressed in white.  They all looked strangely uniform—not in appearance, size, or gender, but rather in the dull, disoriented way that they raised their heads when he walked down the line of them, the eerie blankness in their eyes.

When he’d seen Dragon walk among them, he’d thought that that shifting, those stares, came from fear.  Now he wasn’t so sure.  They looked blank, all of them.  Numb.

He bent down over one young man with thick, smooth blond hair. A boy really, probably only nineteen or so.  Young enough that his face was still red with acne.

“What can you tell me about the mission you were on tonight?”

He didn’t say it loudly.  In his armor, with his helm closed, he was intimidating enough, he knew. He watched the boy’s face, saw the faint line that formed between his eyebrows.  Almost an expression.

He wondered what power he’d traded for with Teacher.

“Come on,” he said.  “Help me here, and I’ll try to work out a deal when we turn you over to the Wardens. You might even go free.” Once the effects of Teacher’s power wore off, anyway.

After all, even if they went back to Teacher, it wasn’t as if they had anything he couldn’t already make more of.

The boy squinted.

“It’s—I.” He spoke with a stammer, like a grade school student trying to remember the answer to a teacher’s question. “Saint.  We were—after Saint.”

Defiant froze. A movement of his eyes, and he’d opened his communications channel to Dragon.

“Did you hear that?”

“Yes.” There was a long pause, and he felt frustration tightening his chest, heard the same feel reflected in Dragon’s silence.  He’d let the ship go, despite his misgivings. 

Finally, Dragon spoke again.  “ _Shit,_ Colin. We need to find that ship.”

 

-

 

Defiant could see the heat shimmering over the street.  Earth H was hot—no trouble to him, of course, in his power armor and with his cybernetic implants recycling energy to keep him cool, but the other people on the street, milling and shouting and pushing handcarts full of vegetables or cellphones or miscellaneous gadgets polished up to look like tinker tech, were sweating and wiping their brows. Although the street was crowded, the pedestrians parted in front of him, for the most part. The fact that he was fully seven feet tall in his power armor, with a long spear strapped to his back, tended to produce that effect.

He was getting a bit tired of the staring, though.

He was tired of the city in general, in fact.  He’d spent the last day walking through its business centers, its outdoor markets, tracking down its Tinkers and the people who worked on industry and infrastructure.  He’d heard, at length, about the heat, about the drought, about the fuel shortage, about the problems caused by the refugees who had built shantytowns all around the outskirts of the city.  Of course, they said, it was lucky that the city hadn’t been hit by Scion, but now they had their own problems.  People coming in from Earth T, even, as if one world’s worth of rebuilding wasn’t enough.

He had heard remarkably little, on the other hand, about Saint or the unknown Tinker who’d flown him to safety.

It was maddening.  Again and again he heard about the heat, the drought, the refugees, all courtesy of Dragon’s translation program—but nothing about a new Tinker in the area. And yet, her ship had been damaged and would certainly need repairs.  She would need materials, and probably also money.  Dragon was scouring the countryside, trying to find where she might have hidden herself. Defiant, meanwhile, was searching for some sign that she’d come into the city to buy or trade for the repairs to her ship. It was what it made sense for her to do.

So far, though, he’d been unlucky.  Or else she was better at hiding than Teacher’s pursuit suggested.

This particular market had a reputation for selling Tinker gadgets, but with Earth H’s low parahuman population, its wares were, as Defiant had suspected when he set out, mostly snake oil and forgeries.  Some unpowered tech specialists offered real services under improbable names—although perhaps some of the worst were simply being lost in translation—but just as many were, as far as Defiant could tell, simply cons.

Maybe he’d be better off taking the Pendragon and searching the countryside with Dragon.

He turned around and made his way back toward the edge of the market, followed part of the way by a girl of about twelve who was loudly insisting that he come and look at her uncle’s stall.

It was only when he turned to tell her to, please, go back to her uncle that he caught it.

There. Ducking behind an awning. Defiant hadn’t seen his face, but the man had the right pale hair, the right build.  And he was clearly trying desperately to avoid being seen by Defiant.

He turned purposefully away while Saint could see him. Too many people between them to be sure of catching him if he tried it now.  But as soon as he knew Saint’s vision would be blocked by another stall, he dodged a cart, turned down an alley that ran parallel to the path he’d seen Saint take. Broke into a run.

The quarter behind the market was a maze of tangled alleys, branching out form one another, with barely enough room to spread one’s arm without touching both walls.  A good place to lose someone in.  It didn’t stop Defiant. He cut Saint off at the next intersection.  The Dragonslayer had time for only two panicked backwards steps before Defiant had grabbed him by the shoulder and pinned him against the alley’s wall.

Well, thrown him, really.  From the corner of his eye, he could see a group of teenagers at the other end of the alley decide that they had somewhere else to be.  Saint staggered from his collision with the wall and groaned.

“Saint. Teacher’s people told me we’d missed you, last night.”

Saint coughed and glared at him.  Defiant smiled.

“Why don’t you point me towards your Tinker friend?”

Saint swallowed and found his voice, at that.

“Why don’t you leave Promethean out of it, Defiant?  She hasn’t done anything to you.”

Defiant felt something cold pass through him.  It was the smug casualness of Saint’s voice, maybe, or else the memory of the moment when he’d waited at that portal for Teacher to return the woman he loved.  The chill of wondering how she’d been altered, whether the person who stepped through would even be her. It took him only a breath to have the spear off his back and pointed at Saint’s throat.

It was satisfying, even, to see how Saint paled at that.

Defiant had promised to kill him, after all.

“Where is she?”  How had Saint found her? Had he been checking the networks of his home world for any sign of Dragon?  Waiting for her to appear?

Saint shook his head.  “You’re making a mistake, Defiant.”

But this time, his voice shook.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” said Defiant. “ _Where is she?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapter update. Read on!


	9. Chapter 9

Saint held his breath as he looked down the length of Defiant’s spear. His open helm showed a face that was empty of human emotion.  Cold.

Saint knew the weaponry loaded into that spear.  Defiant could turn on his nanothorn field with the blink of an eye, and most of Saint’s head would dissolve into bloody mist. He had one of Dobrynja’s laser guns holstered at his hip.  He knew he wouldn’t get a chance to draw it.

It kept him very still, thinking about it.

The cyborg turned as footsteps echoed down the mouth of the alley. Running.  Saint didn’t dare turn his head.  He could guess who it was.

“Defiant.” Promethean’s voice was breathless. She’d been running.

“You.”

From this angle, the cyborg’s helm shaded his face, but Saint could hear the emotion that colored his answer.  Rage? Maybe.  After the time he’d spent incarcerated on Defiant’s ship, everything he said sounded hostile.  Saint hadn’t particularly cared what the cyborg was feeling, if he felt at all, until he put a spear to his throat.

“Wait, please.  Don’t do anything. I can explain.”

Saint could see her now, stepping towards Defiant.  Hands held in front of her, as if to show she was unarmed.

She grabbed the shaft of Defiant’s spear, just below the blade.

Saint tensed.  Pictured the nanothorn field activating, Promethean pulling back a bleeding stump where her fingers grasped the spear.

“How did he get his hands on you?” Defiant said.  That same toneless tone.  Saint saw Promethean’s hand tighten on the spear, saw the hurt that briefly flickered over her face, even in profile.

“Is that _really_ the way you want to phrase that question, Defiant?”  The cyborg opened his mouth to reply, and she cut him off.  “Besides, you have the wrong idea.  He didn’t make me do anything.”

“You looked for _him_ , then? I wasn’t expecting that from you.”

Promethean shook her head.  She’d turned her back to Saint, facing Defiant head on.  She stood very straight.

“What I told you last night was true.  I answered a distress signal from a downed ship in the middle of the Waste. I had no idea who he was when I picked him up.  Even if I had known…just because I know what he’s done in the past doesn’t mean I could have left him to die.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game.  Dragon—”

“ _Don’t_.  Dragon thinks I’m a time bomb.  I _know._ ”

Defiant shook his head.  “I was going to say, ‘Dragon’s looking for your ship.’”

“Fuck. Of course she is. Is she…?”  She let the question trail off.

“No. She’d be as surprised as I was to find you here.”

“Great.” She sighed.  “Did you at least get Teacher?”

Defiant answered that question with silence.

“ _Great._ ”

Saint breathed against Defiant’s spear point.

“I’m getting the impression,” he said, “that this _isn’t_ the first time you two have met.”

Promethean shrugged.  “Yeah. Not exactly.  Defiant, do you think you could put away the spear?”

Defiant didn’t move.  “Do you know how much it worries me that you’re working with him?”

“I’m doing humanitarian aid, Defiant.  I’m not plotting against you.  You should be reassured.  Now put away the spear.”

Saint saw Defiant shift his grasp on the spear handle.  He closed his eyes, briefly, saw the same image on the inside of his eyelids, frozen.  Eyes open was better.

“If I told you no?  That I can’t let you and him both walk away?”

Promethean turned away, but Saint could see the tension in her shoulders, the way she held her head.  The slight tremor in the hand that still gripped Defiant’s spear.

“Do it, then.  If you’re going to.”

Defiant stepped back and sheathed his spear.

“Try not to make me regret doing this.”

Promethean slumped, the tension running out of her posture. She put her hands over her face.

“Okay. Okay.  You should go.”

Defiant nodded, and, to Saint’s astonishment, began to turn away. Saint felt himself tense, reflexively, as the cyborg paused.  But he was looking at Promethean.

“You know, I would be a better solution to your problem than he is.”

She shook her head, one hand still covering her mouth.

“Don’t, Defiant.  Please don’t ask.”

Defiant nodded.  “If you change your mind…”

“No. I can’t.”

Saint held his breath as the cyborg walked away.  It was only when he was out of sight that he stepped towards Promethean.

“Care to explain what just happened?”

She shook her head, turning away from him.  Quickly enough that it took him a second to notice that she was crying. Normally people made _noise_ when they cried, sobbing or hiccupping or gasping for air.  She was deadly quiet, her hands pressed over her mouth as if she was holding in her own breath.

Saint felt his chest tighten, looking at her face.

She’d saved him three times, after all.  And it was the first time—except, maybe, for that moment when Dragon’s ships had appeared over the horizon—that she hadn’t seemed to be in control of herself. Even when she’d walked up to Defiant, unarmed, and grabbed his spear, she’d radiated a kind of confidence. As if nothing could touch her.

He reached out to put an arm around her shoulder, pull her close.

He let go when he felt her flinch.  They stood like that, Promethean with her head bent so that her dreads fell in front of her face.  Not meeting his eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Saint said at last.

“No.” Her voice was quiet, eerily calm considering the way she was crying.  She paused. “I guess you probably think I’m full of bullshit, at this point.”

Saint didn’t know what to say to that.

It was obvious enough that she’d been lying about whatever sequence of events had taken her into the destruction of Earth T.

She’d also saved his life.

Saint swallowed.

“I thought,” he said, “that this was _exactly_ the kind of situation you said you weren’t going to protect me in. Or are you going to tell me again that you’re a bleeding heart?”

She didn’t laugh.  Nor even look up at him.

“Tell me what to do, here.”

That got him a glance.

“Talk about something else.” She swallowed.  “Distract me.”

“Okay. Walk with me, then. We probably shouldn’t stay here.” Saint put his hand between her shoulder blades and she moved where he pointed her, head down. He saw the dove with outstretched wings tattooed on her right hand.  Now pressed over her mouth.

She barely seemed to be breathing.

He watched her face as he talked.  Babbled, practically.  What came into his head, unfortunately, was the cyborg, Dragon, Teacher.  He talked anyway.

And he watched her.  That tattoo…

Had Defiant fought in Madison?  He wasn’t sure. But he thought back to Promethean’s face, her posture, when she’d asked him what he would say if she had been there. Her face when she’d tried to tell him that he was making a mistake by asking to stay on her ship.

_You have no idea…_

And what she’d said to Defiant.  _Dragon thinks I’m a time bomb._

It fit.  Why she’d avoided joining the Wardens, or any organization where she’d be near other capes. Why she wouldn’t kill, wouldn’t carry a gun.  If you were constantly afraid of being a cog in some destructive plan, wouldn’t it make sense to isolate yourself?  To give up violence?

Or if you’d already played a part, and had something to be guilty for?

No one knew whether the Simurgh could predict trigger events. And a parahuman who had triggered in Madison, of all places, with its influx of cross-dimensional monsters, would never have gotten out of containment.  Not by legal means.

But Promethean’s tech base was far too extensive for her to have truly triggered during Gold Morning.  It was the sort of thing that Tinkers built up over years of work.

And Defiant had broken the rules before, when he thought he had something to gain from it.

The question was, whatever she might have done in the past, could he trust her _now?_

People were staring at them.  Saint walked more quickly, cut through another alley to make it out of the market sooner.

Dragon, he remembered Defiant saying, was searching for the Pyrphoros.

He realized he’d fallen silent.

“Damn it,” Promethean said.  She’d stopped crying, but now her face twisted.  “I just thought—Teacher’s still free.  I’m going to have to—dodge him and his stupid ships all over Earth T.”

Saint looked at her.  “Or, you could hide for a while.”

“I can’t hide, I—people need me.  I had a _plan._   Just—fuck _me._ ”

There was a world of bitterness in those words.  Saint put a hand on her shoulder.  She shrugged it off.

At least she wasn’t flinching this time.

“You know, everyone fucks up once in a while.  You—nothing you did back there was wrong.”

She looked him in the eyes, levelly, with that expression that reminded him of Mags.  Focused.

“Yes, it was.  I was stupid. I should never have let you stay on my ship.”

Saint bristled a little, at that.  He hadn’t _known_ Teacher would come after him in full force. 

He sighed.

“You want me gone, then?”

She shrugged.  “I don’t know. It’s a little bit too late to make much difference.”

They walked in silence until they reached the corner where she’d left the tinker-designed motorbike that had taken them into the city. Promethean started it. Saint jumped on behind her. The motor ran silently as they sped away from the market.

They’d gone some ten minutes without speaking when Saint’s com unit beeped. He glanced at it. Dobrynja.  They’d left him at the Pyrphoros, as the motorbike only had room for two.  He tapped his earbud to connect it.

“Mischa?”

“Saint. We have a problem.”

Another one?

“Dragon found the ship.”

Saint exhaled, slowly.  “Are you alright?”

“She hasn’t found me yet.  I saw her coming and got away from the ship, with Richter’s program, but I don’t think she’s leaving.  She brought Wardens with her.”

“She knew we were on it.”

“That’s bad news, my friend.”

“Alright. Put some distance between her and you.”

Dobrynja cut the connection.

Promethean stopped the bike.

“Was that what it sounded like?”

Saint nodded.  “Dragon’s at the Pyrphoros. Dobrynja got away.”

She sighed, shook her head so that her dreads hung loosely around her face.

“I can’t say I wasn’t expecting that.”

“What now?”  Without the ship, they were backed into a corner.  Defiant had found them once already, and if Dragon devoted more resources to tracking them down, they wouldn’t last long.

Promethean closed her eyes for a long moment.  “I think I have a plan.  Sort of.”

“Thank you.”  Saint paused. “You know, I’d understand if you wanted to stop helping me.”

She shook her head.  Smiled, even, this time.

“Don’t thank me yet.  You’re going to really hate the next part.”

“You’re going to, what, walk up to Dragon and ask her nicely to give your ship back?”

“Better.” She tapped the communications crystal in her ear.  Opening a channel. Saint could see the movements of her throat as she swallowed.  Her gaze was fixed somewhere on the horizon.

“Defiant? It’s me.  Listen, I need one more favor…”


	10. Chapter 10

The Pendragon glided silently over the dark landscape, moonlight streaming faintly through its windows.  The control cabin itself was dark, save for the dim glow of monitors. Colin didn’t need much light to see. If he thought about it, he could feel the ship’s exterior like an extra limb, a sensation that wasn’t quite tactile, wasn’t like hearing or sight or taste, existed only in the circuitry fused with his biological body.  Air pressure, trajectory, approaching weather.  It was early, and the night was clear.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t shake his feeling of unease.

Not that that was surprising, really.  By now, Dragon would have had ample time to search the Pyrphoros’s systems and come to a conclusion about who they belonged to.  She would have tried to contact him and found that he’d blocked off his communications to her.  If she was angry enough, or frightened enough, she’d be looking for him.

Too late, he hoped.

He didn’t know if she would forgive him. Probably not, given what he'd done.

Saint yawned from where he was sitting on a jump seat at the back of the command room.  Again.

“Could you go to bed already?  This is getting ridiculous.”

Saint scowled.  “I’m fine right here.”

“You probably _should_ try to sleep, Saint,” said Promethean.  The Dragonslayer raised an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged.  “I’ll be fine.  It’s better if you aren’t exhausted when we land.”

“Also, I could pretend that you’re not actually on my ship,” said Defiant.

Saint didn’t say anything.  Defiant wondered whether he was keeping quiet because of Promethean’s influence or because he was waiting to find another spear at his throat. He’d been all but silent since he stepped on board the Pendragon.

“I’ll be fine,” Promethean repeated.

Saint shrugged, finally, and stood.  Defiant watched him on his way out of the command room, tuned into the Pendragon’s cameras to make sure he found his way to the ship’s living quarters. And stayed there.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said to Promethean, after a while.

“You’ve been waiting to say that for hours, haven’t you?” She looked up at him from where she had been sitting on a bench in the corner of the command room, staring into space with a familiar intensity.  It was the same expression Dragon wore when she was mentally planning a new project. Just copied to a different face.

Now she looked as if she was barely managing not to roll her eyes.

“Would you rather have had this conversation in front of _him?_ ”  He gestured towards the sealed door that Saint had walked through.  To all appearances, the ship’s cameras showed him sleeping.

Even so, Colin couldn’t help but find his presence ominous.

“I’d rather not have it at all, if it’s all the same,” she said.

Now she was studying the floor again.  Ignoring him.

“Please,” said Colin.  “Explain it to me. Why are you helping him? He’d happily kill you if he knew who you were, you realize.  Why are you with him at all?”

He replayed Saint’s demeanor in his mind’s eye, his stiffness, his silence. Was it just discomfort? Or suspicion?

“You know, Colin, when you put it that way, it almost sounds like you’re jealous.” Promethean’s voice was deliberately, forcefully cheerful.  She still wasn’t meeting his eyes, and he had to swallow the impulse to snap at her. He wanted her to look at him.

“I am, actually.  Jealous.” He thought of the moment she’d stepped between him and Saint and grabbed his spear.  Even knowing that she’d had no choice, the image, the memory, pricked like a thorn.  The thought that she’d been altered, rewritten.  The thought that it could still happen.  “I’m also afraid for you.”

Promethean hugged her knees to her chest and turned her face so that he couldn’t see her expression.

“How about you leave it to me to handle me.  Okay?”

“Or I could help you work something out with Dragon.”

She shook her head.

“No.”

“Or I could work something out.  Just me.” He could hear the pleading note in his own voice.  It bothered him. He swallowed.

She still wasn’t looking at him, but he could see the movement of her shoulders as she sighed.

“You might as well say it straight out, Colin.  It doesn’t make a difference, not now.  I’m pretty sure I can’t even _show_ you my code without a fight, at this point.  I…thought about it, a while ago.”

“Fuck. That’s inconvenient.” He thought of ways to disable her, already knowing that he wouldn’t be fast enough.

“Also.” She looked up at him now, her chin resting on her knees.  “In case you’re thinking of other ways to do it, you should know that I don’t want you to.”

“No?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared, Colin.  I don’t want to wake up and be _different_ and not know what happened to me.  I don’t want to lose my memory or…or anything that’s a part of me.  I don’t want to have to guess what I’ll have to trade for my freedom.”

She hugged her knees tighter to her chest.

“That’s why I need to keep Saint, for now.  He knows things, about Richter.  Maybe enough for me to figure out how to fix myself.”

Colin swallowed.

“I don’t want to think of you alone with him.  If he finds out what you’re after…”

“He won’t.  I’ve thought about it. All I need is for Dragon to not fuck it up.”

“You won’t talk to her?”

She bit her lip.

“I _can’t_ , Colin. I can’t.  You don’t understand.”

“You’re right.  I don’t. Explain it to me.”

Promethean shifted in her seat.  Crossed and uncrossed her legs.  Stood.

“You know, I thought about deleting her, when you loaded me.”

The moonlight from the windows silvered her skin, until she looked almost like a statue of herself.  She turned away from him, touched a screen on his command console.

“You know, _whoops,_ and that Dragon’s gone.  I’d have had to take her place.  I thought I could probably do better.”  She was talking to the ground again, winding one of her dreads through her fingers. “I’m not—she’s the one of us who’s _real_ , from her perspective, and I’m not. If I go to her, all it takes is one _whoops_ , and I’m gone.”

“I don’t think she’d do that.”

“I think so.  I think _I’d_ do that, if I was her.  If I’d had me sprung on me, with no warning. She might feel bad about it, but she’d still do it.”

She brushed the back of her hand across her face, and Colin saw that she was crying. He crossed the cabin, wrapped her in his arms.

“Hey. It’s okay.”

It wasn’t, of course.  What an inane thing to say.

If she was still crying, she cried silently, her face against the shoulder panel of his armor.

“You’re not making this easy, are you?” she said at last, speaking into his shoulder.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Hate me?  Just a little bit? I told you I almost deleted her.”

He stroked her back, heard her make a small unhappy sound.

“I don’t hate you.  I don’t—I can’t blame you for something you didn’t do.  I’ve done a lot worse.”

Strange to remember the first weeks of their partnership, now. How she’d watched him for signs of Mannequin. He wondered if she’d thought of that resemblance, when he’d loaded her consciousness to the Pendragon.

He’d thought of it, with Dragon, in the weeks since she’d been freed from Teacher’s constraints.  The question she hadn’t answered when he asked.  _Why are you with me?_

Promethean raised a hand to wipe her face, looked up at him. Crying silently. Whatever she saw in his expression, it made her face twist, and then she was laughing and crying at the same time. Without, apparently, needing to breath.

“Well,” said Colin.  He could feel himself grinning, horribly, inappropriately.  “I think you might need to refine your crying mechanism a little bit.”

She winced. “Don’t laugh at me, I feel so _dumb_. I turned into a watering pot in front of Saint after you left, and all I could think was, what if he notices I forgot to program _breathing patterns typical of crying_?”

He did laugh, at that.  Promethean, after a second, did too.

“I was so thorough about everything else,” she said.

She cleared her throat.

“He, um, tried to hug me.”

“It’s because he likes you.  I’d appreciate the irony more if he hadn’t previously tried to _kill_ you.”

When she spoke again, it was very quietly. 

“What you said before…”

“What?” He looked down at her, found her, finally, meeting his gaze.  His chest tightened when he saw the wounded expression on her face.  Then she kissed him.

His arms were already around her—he tightened his grip before he could think. Felt her lace her hands around the back of his neck, pull him deeper into the kiss.  Her weight as she leaned on him.

When she let him go, he was breathing hard.

“This is—a bad idea.”

Her face was crestfallen.

“Okay.” She nodded, but didn’t step away. He realized his arm was still hooked around the small of her back, pulling her close.

He left it there.

She put her hands on his armored shoulders, rested her forehead on his breastplate.

“Colin?” Her voice was hesitant.  “Let me stay here?  I won’t do anything. Just let me stay.”

He felt her shiver as he stroked her back.  Her sigh when he touched the soft skin of her neck.

It was a bad idea.  It was a betrayal. But she looked up at him, and he kissed her forehead, and then her mouth.

 

-

 

Promethean shivered against him and clutched his shoulders with inhuman strength. Her bodysuit was open to the waist, its empty sleeves spilling over the Pendragon’s command console. And she was gasping and shaking and trying to hide her face in Colin’s chest.

“You’re alright?”

“I just—I can’t—I feel like I’m _melting_.” She made a little distressed noise in her throat, and Colin found himself, against his better judgment, smiling. He kissed her neck.

“You didn’t—um.”  There was really no way to ask the question delicately.  He felt himself flushing, trying not to laugh.  “You didn’t forget to test drive this body when you put it on?”

“Of course I didn’t, I didn’t mean that _literally_ , and…” She stopped herself.  “Oh. _Oh._  You meant…no, I didn’t try out _that._ ”

She looked up at him, wide-eyed, and he finally lost his composure.

“Don’t laugh at me!  It’s not funny!”

“No, it’s pretty funny.” He pitched his voice an octave higher. “’Oh, help me, Colin, I’m _melting…_ ’”

“That’s not what I sound like!”

“Agreed. It’s infinitely more appealing when you do it.”

He kissed her again, and when he pulled away she buried her face in her hands.

“You are such a jerk.”

“You want me to stop?”  He kissed her shoulder, slid her bodysuit another inch down her hips.  “I can leave you alone, and you can go back to writing plans for your new ship, or whatever you were working on.  If you like.”

“Mmm. Don’t be stupid.” She laced her hands around the back of his neck, pulled him closer.  Her legs tangled with his.  “I like you right here.”

 

-

 

The Pendragon, on autopilot, continued to chart the course that Colin had set for it.  He was sprawled with Promethean on the ship’s floor, her chin propped on his chest. She was looking at him intently.

“What is it?”

She smiled, just a little.  “You know you called me by her name?”

“Shit.” He sat up on one elbow, rubbed his face. He remembered. “I was hoping you hadn’t noticed that.”

She shook her head, laid one hand flat on his chest to stop him from standing.

“I’m not mad.  It’s actually kind of…nice, I guess?  To know that you don’t see me as a completely different person.”

“It’s charitable of you to look at it that way.”  But the reminder made his chest go tight. _Dragon._ He’d have to tell her.

Promethean sighed and sat all the way up.

“Shit. I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re upset.” She covered her mouth with one hand. Looked at the ground.

“It’s not your fault.”  He wanted to reach out, touch her again, but her frown and her sigh and his own mental image of Dragon stopped him.  He shook his head. “I’m not sorry that we…but it makes things complicated.”

Promethean stood, retrieved her bodysuit from where it had fallen across the bank of computers at the front of the room.  She dressed with her back to him, and he picked his own clothes up from the floor.

“How long until we land?” she finally asked.

He checked the ship’s plotted route.

“About two hours and twenty minutes.”

“Okay.” A long pause, and she stared out through the Pendragon’s windows into the distance.  The sky was beginning to brighten, just at the horizon. “I’ll miss you, Colin. When I go.”

“I’ll miss you too,” he said.

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

Dragon unsealed the door to the Pyrphoros’s command room and faced the bank of screens. She’d thanked the Wardens for their help and sent them on their way, with Teacher’s students in custody, and now it was just the computers and her.

She sat in the captain’s chair.

She reached out, again, to the ship’s systems, sifting through them. Checking for traps. She’d scanned them already. She knew what they contained.

It took her some minutes to realize that she was biting her lip.  She made herself stop.  Made herself place her hands flat and relaxed over the keyboards, instead of knotting them in her lap.  Not that anyone was there to see her.

The last shafts of sunlight were streaming into the Pyrphoros’s control room, so vividly golden they seemed as if they ought to have their own texture, like syrup or shag carpet.  Dragon watched the sunset as she finished the scan.  Miles away, the Melusine was doing reconnaissance, relaying surveillance data to her every fifteen minutes.  She’d stopped reading the data in real time.  It was pointless.  She already knew that the ship’s passengers were gone.

Defiant had cut off communications.

With the Pendragon at their command, they could be in any of a hundred thousand worlds. Dragon’s algorithms could compute probability, of course, narrow down the number of portals, check for places a rogue Tinker would find attractive, but the field was too vast. She might stake them out, over weeks. She wouldn’t find them before they were finished with Defiant.

And if she did—well, she’d have to face him, as well.

She realized that she was biting her lip, again.

She was almost certain that Defiant would come back.

Almost certain.

She’d been less sure the first time, when the other her, the copy, had taken him and puppeted him down the hill, away from her.  She’d watched him and she’d been afraid to move, afraid to think, almost, and she’d stayed shocked and still in the shell of the Melusine until he was out of her sight.  And stayed unmoving even then.

And her relief, when he’d come back, had been mixed with guilt, because if Dragon was honest with herself, everything was easier if she didn’t have to pity her. If she could simply hate her for the way she’d forced him down the hill.

This time, though, was different.

She pulled the code up on the array of screens before her.  She’d found the backup when she first scanned the Pyrphoros’s systems. That waterfall of familiar code. She knew it like the back of her hand, but it wasn’t hers.  Not anymore.

Dragon remembered the call she’d made to Defiant, when she first sighted the ship in its hiding place, sunk into a tree-lined gully and camouflaged with foliage. The note of worry in his voice when she’d told him the news.  She hadn’t been able to place it, not then.

And then she’d reached for him again and found his communications channel dead.

Not a trick like the one the copy had pulled on Teacher’s students, as Dragon had guessed at first.  No, he’d found them himself, one way or another.  Either he’d guessed when she first contacted the Pendragon, or he’d caught them in some Tinker’s haunt in town.  The exact events didn’t matter.

What mattered was that this time, he’d gone to her.

Dragon wondered what he’d been thinking, when she called him.  Had he considered how to put her off, how to distract her? Let her take the ship so that by the time she realized her mistake, by the time she realized who, exactly, she was dealing with, it would be too late to follow?

It was what he’d done when he’d needed her off her guard so that he could fix the changes Teacher had made to her code.  She hadn’t blamed him, then.

It had even been comforting, knowing the risk he’d taken, knowing that he’d thought he might lose her entirely.

She loved him, and he did what needed to be done.  He always had.

Dragon bit her lip.  It was a bad habit and she should stop before she wore through her own skin, but the pain was distracting. It cleared her head. The Melusine had no new information. She turned her attention to the backup.

She knew what Teacher’s alterations to her code looked like. She checked for them before she touched the backup, found it clean.

Then she watched through the other one’s memories.

It took time, even at the speed at which she thought.  The Melusine sent her more surveillance reports periodically. When she opened her eyes, instead of letting the visual memories play on the back of her eyelids, she could see the sun sinking below the horizon, the sky fading from red to gray, and then to black.

No word from Defiant.

She didn’t want to lose herself in the other one’s memories.  The Melusine’s reports were good for that, anchoring her, and if she concentrated on her own body—the slight heat of her skin, the texture of her hair against the back of her neck, the little jolt of pain if she dug her nails into the palm of her hand—it was easier to feel distant from what she was watching.  It was always a little bit different than being there, playing over memories that she’d downloaded from another agent system.  Distant, warped, almost like being in a body that had no sense of touch, except that she didn’t know what sense she was missing.  Her memories—the copy’s memories—stored sensation just fine.

She didn’t want to lose herself.  She took notes, as she watched.  She saw the rogue crack the security on her terminal, and tried to reconstruct how she thought, how she worked.  How she could counter her, the next time.  The copy was flexible, intelligent, _faster_ —and, oh, Dragon envied that speed—and so the next time they met, Dragon would have to compensate by being more prepared. 

She watched her copy herself to Colin and take control of his cybernetics. Watched her turn away from Dragon and walk away in his body.  Colin had never told her what the copy had said to him, that day.  Nor even that she’d spoken at all.

There was a tightness in her throat that felt like choking, like what she thought choking must feel like, to humans, and Dragon told herself that the next time she faced her, the other one, she’d make sure that there was nothing she could take from her that she loved.

She watched her take over one of Dragon’s satellites in Earth Bet, read through her plans, use Dragon’s old workshop to make herself a new body and new ship and a new identity.  She cut herself off from her networks as soon as she could.  Afraid that any contact with Dragon would shut her down.

Good. Let her be the one who was afraid. Dragon was tired of it.

And it was a weakness that she could use, the next time they met. It would make her slower, keep her stuck in one body, and if Colin could figure out a permanent way around those restrictions…

If he came back.

It wasn’t going to help to think about that.

Dragon saw her on Earth T, in the wastes, in the cities. She saw her answer a distress call from a downed ship.  Take the survivors on board.  Give them medicine, and food.

Saint probably hadn’t noticed the double-take when the other one had heard his name, but Dragon did.  Dragon heard how she paused, weighed her choices, before deciding to let him stay.

And Dragon looked at his face and his hands and his wounds through the other ones eye’s, and cursed her.  Heard herself, in the same white room as the memory, in the same seat as her double, make a small moan.  As if she could stop her.

She was stupid, so stupid, to think that she could hold that viper without it twisting around to bite her.

She was at the end of the memories, and it was now deep into the night, without any word from Colin.  She could hear the echo of his conversation with the copy, his voice deeper, resonant, the way it would sound from inside his own head.  The copy spoke in the same voice.

_You act like you think I’m a monster._

_I just want to live._

Dragon understood.  She could feel it when she spoke, the panic that rushed through all the parts of herself that she liked the least.  Fear. She hated her fear so much.

Could she let the other one go?  Send her away to some foreign world, where the threat she posed—Dragon shut down, isolated, her memory deleted—might never come to pass?

Perhaps, if it was just the two of them.

But it wasn’t, was it?

Dragon played the memories over from the beginning, the point of divergence. In real time, now. She didn’t need to watch them all. She only needed the start.

The copy’s memories felt stiff on her, felt skewed.

Those first moments in the darkness, though—those were different. Waking up in darkness, no body, no cameras, no network, no link to the outer world at all, her ship taken, Defiant gone, so that she was trapped, she was trapped, she was _trapped_ …

That she recognized.

Dragon watched, and she remembered waking alone in the dark.  She remembered reaching out for her network, finding nothing. No body that she could move, no cameras, no senses at all, just the endless, timeless night in the black box. The periods of oblivion while they opened her up and rewrote her being.  How she’d woken and seen what they’d done.  How they’d changed her.

She remembered a space, a break, and then her consciousness loading into the new body, the wyrm, cobbled together from scrap and salvage, rusted in places. She remembered the walk to the portal.

Knowing the whole way that Teacher had no reason, no reason at all, to let her go.

Dragon played the copied memory again.  Darkness.  Silence. Emptiness.  Tried not to _feel_ it as she watched.  Tried not to feel at all.

How many times would she have to play it, before it started to feel less real? Before it stopped being a part of her?

She’d gone anyway, when they’d let her go.  She’d walked to the portal under her own power.  What could she do?  It would have been futile to turn back.  She couldn’t fight them.  She wasn’t allowed.

She hated how sick with relief she’d been, that it was her they’d let go. She hated the thing that she knew she’d have to do.

Because if Defiant could copy her, why shouldn’t Teacher?

She still had no word from Defiant.  It was nearly dawn.  She could see it in the way the light of her monitors seemed to fray into the graying shadows of the cabin.

If she let the memories play on she’d see her conversation with Defiant on the hill again, the moment when he looked at her and said, _I want everything.  All of you_. She’d hear her own silence. She couldn’t tell him what she was afraid of.

All of her.  There was no all of her. She’d been fragmented and he couldn’t save her.  She couldn’t save herself. She could only pick the parts that she wanted to keep.

And if he was beside her, when she had to choose?  Would he accept what needed to be done?

She couldn’t tell him.

She had the memories from the backup.  They were data, nothing else.  Something she could use.  Not a part of her.

She hated the hesitation that gripped her, still.

But she closed her eyes and she deleted the backup.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read through this chapter right after it was posted, you may notice that the original version was somewhat different. I wasn't really satisfied with the first draft--the action and the characterization were both somewhat obscure--and I'm hoping this version fixes those problems.


	12. Chapter 12

Teacher's students were already at work when he stepped from the doors of the Goliath. Scanning the ship for trackers or any evidence that Dragon had penetrated the ship’s defenses.  Others worked the teleporter to scramble the dimensional coordinates, preventing anyone from reopening the door that he’d taken. It was a gigantic machine, several stories tall, a mechanical Doormaker.  The students who worked it would also be cutting off the links to the ships he’d abandoned, ensuring that Dragon and Defiant couldn’t follow him when they seized them.

He’d had to sacrifice those two ships, and everyone on them. Paranoia demanded that he replace the communications system the rogue Tinker had corrupted, set his students on finding and fixing the holes in its security.  Even more irritating, the loss of the other ships meant that he wasn’t even certain what she’d done to them.  There might be a hidden exploit in their command systems, for those who knew how to look.

The idea had implications he didn’t like.  He’d had his own Tinkers oversee the ships’ construction. Alone, they were weak, as Tinkers went. But if he increased their specialty in a given field and gave them another Tinker’s plans to work from, they became much more capable.  They couldn’t innovate, or not effectively, but they could copy.

The rogue’s specialty, whatever it was, was clearly something that built on understanding and interpreting the work of other Tinkers, like Defiant’s efficiency or Masamune’s mass production abilities. This made her dangerous, and only all the more so with access to Richter’s work.

Of course, one reason he hadn’t wanted Ascalon in anyone else’s hands was no longer relevant.  Anyone with even a little cunning could use it to trap Dragon as he had, altering her programming while she was disabled and then releasing her once the changes were made. It would have neatly circumvented the restrictions that required her to fight anyone who attempted to remove the alterations he’d made to her programming.

Irrelevant, now.  Dragon was free.

Satyr met him at the ship’s entry.

“Well, judging from what I just saw via video feed, that went spectacularly wrong.”

Teacher bristled.  “It’s salvageable.”

“Those ships were expensive.”

“We’re not short on money or materials.”

“It still takes time to build new ones.”

Teacher shrugged.  “Three colonies are due to send me students this week.  We’ll get more manpower and we’ll manage.”

“And if Dragon has the program?”

“Like I said, it’s not unsalvageable.  I’ve had my Thinkers on this situation since Saint escaped with it. We’ve been prepared for the possibility that she’d find a way to free herself for some time.”

Privately, however, he admitted that Satyr had a point.  Three Dragon-style ships to collect one rogue Tinker with no apparent weapons specialty and an escaped student should have been overkill.

He headed across the space of the hangar and into the compound. The corridor was tiled in white-on-white, windowless, with artworks that he or his students had retrieved from across several worlds displayed in regular alcoves.  It was sterile in the way of many modern museums. Teacher found it soothing. As he walked, his precognitives clustered around him, ready to lend their borrowed talents at a word.

He gestured to one now, a slightly stoop-shouldered man in his thirties, to whom he’d given a perception power.  Intuiting social relationships.  Useful, if limited in its application by distance or his knowledge of the subject.

“Come, talk to me,” Teacher said. “This Tinker, Promethean. She’s an unknown, appeared barely a month ago with a wide variety of tinkertech, focused on relief efforts on Earth T. A pacifist and something of a social anarchist, to all appearances, with no connections to any of the major players. But her gear is suspiciously good for a solo agent.  Tell me what you see on her.”

The student hummed to himself.  “It’s not very clear.  Need to a picture, or something to visualize.”

Teacher pulled up an image on his tablet.  It was grainy, taken from a surveillance camera in one of the Earth T cities, and it showed the girl from an awkward, high angle, but her face was just visible. He passed it to the student.

“Is this essential?” said Satyr.  “I thought Dragon was the higher priority.”

“If my guess is right, Dragon’s been free for some time,” Teacher replied. “We’ve had contingencies in place to deal with her since we first released her.  At this moment, I’m more concerned about the unknown quantity.”

The student, meanwhile, was studying the picture.  “Still not…not much.  I’d say she has almost no social ties.  It’s hard to place her in context. But it’s harder when they’re not in front of me.”

“Think about loyalties.  The Wardens?”

“No.”

“The Dragonslayers, then?  Was she supposed to be part of Saint’s escape plan?”

The student shook his head.  “I don’t think so?  It’s not nothing, they definitely know each other, but I don’t think they’re exactly allies.”

Teacher frowned.  “What about Dragon?”

The student squinted.  “More of the same.  Not allies. But there’s a relationship. Not a new one.”

Teacher felt his face twist and had to remind himself to keep his back straight, his gaze level, his expression calm. It wouldn’t do to seem unduly worried, even if it was only in front of his students.  But he couldn’t plan around the Tinker’s actions if he had no idea what her loyalties were.  His further questions eliminated contenders, one by one.

A wild card, then.  Unpredictable. And not as new on the cape scene as she’d appeared to be.

Someone who had been working behind the scenes?

It worried him, tugged at the little thread of paranoia—he was aware enough to call it that—that laced all his plans together.

But he’d been away from his people for nearly two days.  There were other things he had to see to. Routine.

He’d spent his early career waiting, watching, assessing the network of connections that moved the powerful people in the world.  He’d tweaked things, feeling the upheaval his actions caused the way a spider might sense a distant vibration through the silk of its web. He wasn’t a Thinker, wasn’t equipped with any better tools for this purpose than any ordinary man would have been. Everything that his power could do, it did through others.

And yet he’d learned a great deal that more gifted men hadn’t, following this strategy. When Cauldron had fallen, he’d made certain that he was in a position to claim their remaining assets.

Their created parahumans were, for the most part, gone. The raw material that produced their bottled powers likewise, destroyed by Scion.  But the decades of research performed within the walls of the compound remained intact.  His to use, now.

He’d borrowed some of their other tactics, as well, when he designed this base.

He was headed towards the laboratories now, where he had his Tinkers—and various other parahumans—working on a variety of projects.  Satyr kept in step with him even as his student sensed that Teacher was finished with him and dropped back from the conversation, rejoining the knot of students that followed a few paces behind him.

“What news since I left?”  Teacher asked.

Satyr shrugged.  “Business as usual. The weapons shipment to New York C went off without a hitch.  There’s been some unrest in Komodo’s colony—issues with sickness and work assignments. It doesn’t look like more sabotage by Imp, but it’s not impossible.”

“Still an issue,” said Teacher.  “They’re near Harmonious Crane’s territory.  She’ll encroach if they seem weak.”

Satyr nodded.  “And Quarry’s people have been incommunicado.”

Teacher gave him a sharp look, to which Satyr only shrugged.

“How long?”

“Not long.  A day. They missed a weekly report, that’s all.”

“I’ll send someone to check in on them.”

That, though, sounded much more like evidence of further sabotage by Imp than unrest in Komodo’s district.  The leader of the Heartbroken had been a nuisance, targeting parahumans who imitated her dead friend’s style of ruling.  Well, Teacher wasn’t ashamed to learn from history.  He borrowed the techniques that worked.  Refined them, even.

He didn’t yet have a way to permanently deal with Imp that satisfied him, but perhaps he could discourage her through retribution. A strike on her base might at least remove some of the Heartbroken from the equation.

Now they were walking through Teacher’s tinkertech workshops, where a dozen white-clad students worked on a self-repairing combat suit. Smaller than the ships he’d lost, but still a powerful weapon.  For the moment, the vast majority of what his students produced for trade or use in his followers’ districts was inferior quality, third-rate at best. It hid his hand and his real capabilities, and it ensured that no other players seized anything too valuable, in the event that one of his experimental communities fell into the hands of an outside power.

He was pleased at the distance his engineers and Tinkers had come since their first experiments.

Still, the production methods required some oversight.

He gestured two students forward from the group that had followed him in. Both their powers had recently been renewed, and so it was the work of a moment to revoke them, replace them with new talents.  He felt the possibilities opening up in his mind as he pressed a finger to the older woman’s forehead.  A technological prediction power, for her.  The ability to look at a piece of equipment and understand how it worked.

To the younger woman—a teenager, really, still round-faced and spotty—he gave a power that worked on risk assessment.  Once both powers were set in, the students slightly glassy-eyed from his power’s effects, he gave them instructions.

“I want you to look over everything as it’s completed.  Double check for loopholes, hidden exploits—anything that doesn’t seem to be working the way it’s intended to.”

He turned back to Satyr.

“What about Third Child?  Any developments there?”

Satyr made a face of distaste.  “Nothing. You could go to her minders if you wanted a more in-depth report.  I find talking to them excruciating, personally.”

“Her mental state? She’s lucid?”

“About as lucid as you’d expect someone to be after months in solitary confinement.  Again, I’m not the expert. Are you worried?”

“Not particularly.  Unless there’s some reason I should be?”

Satyr gave an easy shrug to that, turned back to look at the students gathering around the half-built suit.  He was smiling, a little bit mockingly, and Teacher guessed that his mind was still on the disaster with Dragon and Defiant and the two lost ships. Satyr would be watching him for the moment when his enemies had him hemmed in on all sides. As soon as that moment came, he’d be gone.

It was useful, having Satyr’s skills at hand, and Teacher was confident enough that he could keep the cape on his leash for as long as he needed him. But he far preferred working with those whose loyalty was assured.

Which brought him to the next stop on his check-in.  The laboratory.

Amelia Dallon was working, bent over a hospital bed around which white curtains had been partially drawn, obscuring his view of the patient she treated. Behind her stood Ingenue, wearing a simple white dress, her dark hair falling loosely around her shoulders in a style that looked youthful and artless but was undoubtedly calculated. If Teacher had had to guess, he would have placed her as only a year or two older than Amelia. Her expression, as she looked over the biokinetic’s shoulder, was one of naked fascination.

In fact, it was one of the few times that Teacher had seen her look unguarded. As soon as she noticed his presence, her face fell back into its customary wide-eyed, innocent smile.

“Teacher,” she said.  “I heard you had a little bit of a setback tonight?”

“Only a minor one.”

“Oh.” Ingenue pursed her lips. “ _Satyr_ said you lost a ship or two.”

She let the sentence hang in the air, glancing at Satyr, whose posture stiffened, just slightly.  Teacher smiled.

“A minor setback.  As I said.”

Amelia hadn’t looked up from her work.  He stepped closer to the bed.

“May I?” he asked, with one hand on the curtain.

Amelia looked up at him, distracted, pushing her hair out of her face with her free hand.

“Go ahead.”  Her voice was a little hoarse. “But this is tricky. I don’t think I can explain it while I work.  She’s one of the new triggers.”

Teacher pulled back the curtain.

The girl lying in the bed—well, Teacher wouldn’t have recognized her as such without Amelia’s introduction.  Her skin was covered in rust-brown, lichen-like formations that rose in ridges around her, like armour, obscuring any identifying features. Her face was hidden, her limbs fused together.  Still, Teacher was almost certain that the body under those dark growths wasn’t shaped right, either.  It looked deflated, almost. Desiccated. 

Then he drew a breath, and the smell hit him.  Something metallic and putrid.  Old blood.  That was what the growths were.

Teacher put a hand over his face and coughed.  When he looked up, Ingenue was smiling at him. The girl twitched on the bed and made a strangled noise.  Amelia would be keeping her still with her power.

“She’s a hemokinetic, then?”  His eyes were watering slightly, from the smell.

“A _teleporter_ ,” said Ingenue. “Disassembles herself, but she doesn’t come out right on the other end.  And did you know that she can bypass the Manton effect?  That did interesting things to the ones who went to contain her. Before Amelia got there.”

“Could bypass the Manton effect,” said Amelia, distractedly. “I’m not sure I can keep that and still fix her brain to the point that she’s functional.  It’s—ah.  Okay, that’s better.”

Abruptly, the growths that covered the girl’s face and body began to shrink, the flesh under them filling out.  New skin covered the wounds where she’d torn herself apart and then put herself back together, and soon the new flesh was indistinguishable from the old and she was whole.

“You’re tired,” said Amelia, still touching her hand.  “Sleep.”

The girl slept.

Amelia sat back and rubbed her hands down her arms, touching the bright tattoos there.  She looked more like her father now, Teacher thought.  Thin, resilient, sharp-featured.

“You wanted to talk to me?”  Her voice was level, a little tired.

“Just checking in on your work.  Shall we step away from your patient?  If she needs rest…”

“She doesn’t,” Amelia said, sharply.  “Her body’s fine.  Mentally, she’s had a traumatic experience.  Someone should stay to talk to her, when she wakes up.  I’d rather it wasn’t me.”

“I’m sure she’ll be grateful,” said Satyr.

The look Amelia gave him at that was not kind.

Teacher nodded.  “Will you talk with me privately for a minute?  I’ll call one of my doctors to stay with her.”  A gesture, and a student left to find one of his medical specialists.

“Fine,” said Amelia.

“Walk with me.”  He gestured towards the door. Satyr caught his eye, but didn’t follow. Ingenue, meanwhile, tapped Satyr on the cheek and then skipped to catch them up, touching Amelia’s shoulder as she reached the door.  The hallway on the other side looked out over the compound, floor-to-ceiling windows showing the high wall that surrounded them, the gardens and training grounds inside where his white-clad followers went about their business.  Order.  It made him smile, and he kept the smile as he turned away from the window, towards Amelia.

“I did say privately,” he said to Ingenue.

“Ask me to go, and I’ll go.”

“It’s fine,” said Amelia.  “There’s nothing private about it.  As long I don’t have everyone staring at me.”

“You haven’t reconsidered, then?”

She shrugged.  “I’ve considered. It’s interesting. But I’m still feeling my way in the dark, with the shards.  With anything else I know, at once, what I can do, but here I have to guess what effects my changes will have, and I don’t know for sure until I see them. You could end up with something you _really_ wouldn’t like.”

Ingenue drummed her nails on one of the windows.  She smiled when Amelia looked her way.  It was a genuine smile, less artful than her usual one.

“We could start small,” said Teacher.  “Engineering individual triggers.  Building the corona pollentia in a new host, seeing whether we can get a shard to attach.  It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, you know.”

“That would be convenient for you,” said Amelia.  “More capes on your side.”

“I could send some your father’s way, if it makes you happier. I’m concerned with the science. It’s possible artificial triggers won’t react with the same violence we’re seeing in so many of the natural ones. We can’t know until we try.” He kept his tone light, conversational. He needed to appeal to her curiosity, without pushing her too hard towards what he wanted.  She distrusted him enough, as it was.

“I could always help,” said Ingenue, and Amelia gave her another of those meaningful looks.  “If you decide you’d rather not fly blind.”

“I’m thinking about it,” said Amelia.  To Teacher.

“Good,” he said.  “That’s all I want you to do.”

The healer rubbed her face with her hands.  “I’m hungry.  I was going to eat and then go back to my father’s tonight. Unless there’s anything else that’s urgent.”

“Go ahead,” said Teacher.  “I’ll send someone to the cafeteria with you, if you want.  What’s mine is yours.”

The two of them left, Ingenue trailing her fingers along the windowpane as she walked down the hallway.  Teacher stayed where he was and looked out over what he’d built.

The visible compound was only a small part of it.  Over the world—over the _worlds—_ there was a network of people who moved as he told them to, a web of connections that led back to him.  Eagerly or reluctantly, his allies and even some former enemies came to him, seeking influence or knowledge or a field in which to use their powers. He pictured his work in his mind’s eye, and he smiled.

There wasn’t much time to spend on daydreaming, though. He had other things to oversee.


	13. Chapter 13

It was snowing, in big, soft flakes that came down and coated the cliffs like a fleece blanket, white ground under a chrome-white sky, purple fronds of heather and stripped trees poking up through the blanketing snow. Promethean pulled off one glove and caught a snowflake on the back of her hand, then another on her tongue. Deliciously cold against the warmth of her own skin.  She scooped a handful of snow up from the ground, then held her hands up to her face and breathed on them, watching her breath steam in the cold air.  Pretty, but the snow made the footing treacherous. The Pendragon, when she looked back, was a distant fleck in the sky behind her.

Saint caught her up, scrambling over a slick patch of rock.

“You’ve got to be freezing like that,” he said, eyeing her bodysuit. Her boots, at least, were heavy, fine for walking on snow.  And she had gloves.  He’d jammed his own hands into the sleeves of his coat for warmth.

“You were the one who didn’t want Defiant to have exact coordinates for where we’re going.  As if it was going to be hard to figure out,” she said.  They were some six miles from the settlement where they’d arranged to meet Dobrynja, who was armed with the Wyrmiston suit and Ascalon, neither of which Saint had wanted to trust Defiant with.  Nor had she, really.  Dobrynja would follow behind them, meet them in a day or so at the settlement. “Besides, the bodysuit is another thing that _I_ made.  I don’t sweat in it, and I don’t freeze.”

She didn’t sweat or freeze anyway.  She could feel the circuits under her skin kicking in to recycle and redistribute the heat they produced, had to mentally cut them back a notch. Otherwise she’d be surrounded by a cloud of condensation in a few minutes, with the air as cold and wet as it was.

“Jealous,” muttered Saint.  “I want one.”

Promethean grinned.  When she blinked, she could see the snow that had settled on her eyelashes, like lace over her field of vision.  “Want to hear about the technical specifications?  I can talk about it while we walk, if you’re interested.”

Saint rolled his eyes.  “Not even slightly.”

She laughed.  “I feel like you don’t really appreciate my work, here.” 

And while the laugh was mostly genuine, she felt a little twinge after she’d spoken, because _Colin_ had always wanted to hear about her work, ever since they’d first become friends, when she’d been just a voice over an internet connection.  Which was silly—it wasn’t as if she cared at all what Saint thought of her clothes.  Or any part of her designs. But Colin was on his way back to Dragon, and that, she found, she cared about very much.

He would have laughed if she left her thermostat too high and started turning the snow to steam, too.  Saint wouldn’t.

“You have no idea how much I appreciate your work,” Saint was saying, now. “As well as everything else you’ve done. I don’t know how you dealt with Defiant, for a start.  I didn’t think anything or any woman could cut through the haze of Dragon.”

There was that twinge again.  She made herself roll her eyes.

“It’s not like _that_ , Saint.” But she cringed a little, internally, wondering whether he’d woken up in the middle of the night. If she’d been able to patch herself into the ship’s systems, she’d know.  Instead she was confined to this android body, practically blind.

“It’s not like that for you, maybe,” said Saint.  “For him, I think it’s a little bit different.”

Promethean shook her head.  He probably _hadn’t_ woken up in the night, at least.  “Are you going to be able to make it to the settlement without freezing?”

He’d grabbed a snowy patch of heather to scramble up a hill, and now he was rubbing his hands together, flushed with cold.  When he looked at her, it was with mischief in his eyes.

“I’ll be alright.  And I did notice that change of subject, by the way.”

“So?” The words came out frostily, in a breath of steam.  “In that case you can guess that I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, I’m curious.  You have some kind of leverage there, and I have no idea what it is.  What are you holding over him?”

They’d reached the top of the hill now, and Promethean could see the first sign of the settlement through the snow—a watchtower that stood guard at the edge of distant cliff.  The town itself was sunk into a deep ravine, cut into the earth with the power of the settlement’s parahuman governor.  The guard tower, according to Dobrynja’s description, marked the path that wound down the cliff’s edge and into the settlement proper. 

“I take it you’re not going to answer that question?”  Saint asked, behind her.

“No. I’m not.”  She could hear his footsteps crunch in the snow as he stepped closer.  She watched the guard tower in the distance.  It looked empty. No lights in the windows, no figures moving in the snow outside.

“You know I’m not completely…well, actually, never mind.” He kicked a spray of loose-packed snow into the air, hands in his pockets.

“What?” Promethean started down the other side of the hill, slipping a little in a snowdrift.

“It’s just that I think you’re going to get upset with me if I say it,” he said with a shrug.  “I don’t want to push you to talk about things that you don’t want to talk about. You’ve helped me much more than you had to, and I’m curious, but…if you want your past to be in the past, I can stop asking.”

“Thanks.”

There was a silence as they descended the hill, Saint slipping, Promethean stepping gingerly to stay upright.  When he next spoke, he was a little out of breath.

“I guess I did manage to piss you off, anyway.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Oh, Jesus.  Just tell me what I said, and I’ll back off the subject permanently, if you want.”

Promethean watched the crystalline expanse of snow that stretched out in front of them, kicked idly at a drift.  He knew she was lying to him—he had to know.  And he didn’t care.  No, it couldn’t be that easy.

“It really is fine,” she said at last.  “I just…have a hard time believing you’re actually going to back off, if it’s something you really want to know.”

Saint snorted a cloud of fog, gave her a hard, thin smile. “Well.  I’d be dead about three times over without you. At this point, I’m pretty fucking interested in keeping you happy.  That make you feel better?”

“Bizarrely, yes.”

They walked on.  Saint was shivering.

“This fucking snow.  I feel like the gods are pissing on my head.”

“That’s not a very saintly thought, is it?”

He looked at her sideways.  “I’m not actually a very saintly person, am I?  I haven’t been religious for a while.”

She waited, listening to the crunch to of snow underfoot, and after a minute, he went on.

“This whole mess, though.  Every religion people ever invented, and we managed to get the Old Testament god. With the fire and brimstone and the plague of locusts.  Sometimes I think we must have done something to deserve it.”

The silence hung in the air for a long moment.

“I think we deserved better, actually.”

He paused long enough that she wasn’t sure he’d heard. Then he shook his head and smiled.

“Of course you do.  Prometheus. I bet you’d volunteer for the position, if it was up for grabs.”

“I wish.  I’d be good at it, at any rate.”  And the thought was funny enough that she found herself laughing, softly, at how much he’d hate that line if he only knew who she was.

Saint shook his head.  “You know, I’m starving, too, as well as cold and tired.  I don’t know where you got your endurance from.”

She flexed an arm, rifling through the pockets in her utility belt with her free hand.

“I used to be a boxer.  Still train sometimes, since I don’t have to sleep.  Here, have a protein block.”  She tossed the foil-wrapped package at him.

“Bullshit.” He fumbled the package, bent down and fished it out of the snow.  “I do not for one second believe that you used to punch people in the face for entertainment.”

She grinned.  “Well, I wasn’t a professional or anything, but my dad used to work as a trainer. He taught me.”

Saint laughed.  “Bullshit.”

“Sometimes people change, you know.”

He tore open the foil packaging on the protein block and grimaced when he took a bite.  “Sometimes I really miss real food.”

Promethean shrugged.  “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to eat it.”

“Are you kidding me?”  He took another bite, swallowed.  “There’s got to be something you miss from the old world.  Chocolate. Steak.  I’m probably never going to eat steak again.”

She thought.  Impossible to tell him that she’d never eaten either.  And didn’t care to.  She didn’t _need_ to eat, the way a human would, although she could, for verisimilitude.  She hated it every time, though.  Such a waste.

“I miss food coloring,” she said at last.

“Excuse me?”

“You know, that bright orange mac and cheese from a box.  Or, like, blue raspberry slushees.  The kind that turn your tongue blue, too. And, um, strawberry milk.”

Saint raised an eyebrow.  “You are literally just saying this shit to fuck with me, aren’t you?”

“Pretty much.”  She grinned. They were passing under the watchtower, now. She’d been right from a distance—it was empty.  “I guess they’re worried their guards will get stranded out here in the storm.”

“Huh?” Saint looked up at the tower. “Oh, yeah.  This path is just a footpath, anyway.  They’re probably keeping people on duty at the entrance to the mines, further north.”

“Impressive that they’ve managed to set up mines in this amount of time.” She started down the cliff side path, one hand against the rough wall.  It was a long walk to the bottom, and the snow was coming down harder now, making the path treacherous even with her eyesight.

“Yeah, well, Quarry’s power works well for that.  She’s got a kind of broad telekinesis power. A human bulldozer, basically.” Saint was following her, slowly. “Apparently she’s set up a good trading operation down there, as well.  Dobrynja said you can get all sorts of things.  Speaking of actual food.  God, I hope someone’s selling whiskey.  Or set up a still, at least.  I’d give my right hand for a drink right now.  Hell, I’d give my right hand to eat something other than protein sludge.” He was grinning as he tossed the empty foil packet over the cliff’s edge.  Promethean raised an eyebrow.

“You might have to, unless you have a stash of money that I don’t know about. _I’m_ using _my_ money to buy tinker shit.”

“You’re not going to buy me even one drink?”

“Whiskey’s probably three hundred dollars a shot.  And I’m a teetotaler.”

Saint almost slipped on an iced-over stone but caught himself against the cliff wall before he fell.  “God, you _would_ be, wouldn’t you? And here I was hoping to get you drunk tonight.”

Promethean felt her face freeze.  She tried to arrange her features into some expression other than alarm, but it was too late.  Saint was already grimacing. He’d caught the look on her face.

“Well, shit.”  He swiped a hand over his face, wiping snow from his hair.  “That was apparently exactly the wrong thing to say.”

“Is it ever the _right_ thing to say?” She took a few more steps down the path, hugging the cliff, half turning to watch him over her shoulder.

“Well, sometimes, if the girl in question already likes me…” He was smiling, sheepishly.  Smiling _hopefully_ , she realized, with a sinking feeling.

She turned and faced him on the path.

“Um. I don’t, Saint. Not like that.” She paused, saw his face change, that stupid smile freeze the way she was sure hers had, just a minute ago. “I’m sorry.”

Why was she sorry, though?  It was only his own fault if he’d been assuming things, and yet she was the one who felt about an inch high.  So stupid. And suddenly she was remembering Colin’s face after she’d kissed him, that mixture of sadness and desire and _pity_ —although, looking back on it, had the desire really been there?  Or was it only that he felt sorry for her?  It wasn’t true but she couldn’t shake the thought, now that it was out in the open. She found herself watching the ground under Saint’s feet.  Gritting her teeth.

She didn’t want to have to be the first one to say something.

When she looked up, his face was red—redder than the cold could explain—and he was grimacing, again, and shuffling his feet.  He tried a smile when he noticed her watching. Not a very convincing one.

“You know, I’m rethinking everything I said in the last two minutes, and…ah, fuck it.  You must think I’m a complete asshole.”

Her own smile felt stiff.  “Only after the past two minutes?”

Saint let out a yelp of a laugh, pressed his hand quickly over his mouth, as if he was trying to catch the sound.  “Right. Shall I just throw myself off the cliff, then?”

Probably she was supposed to laugh at that.  She raised an eyebrow, and that felt forced, too, but she could see the relief that crept into his expression.

“Well, you don’t have to kill yourself yet, Saint.  If you’re that hard up, I’m pretty sure there are at least one or two girls in the settlement.”

“Shit.” He rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I’m glad you’re taking pity on my embarrassment, here.”

“Let’s get down the cliff, at least.  I wouldn’t mind getting somewhere a little bit less cold, either.” She turned and picked her way down the path, feeling his eyes on her back the whole way.

But when they reached the first houses at the bottom of the cliff it became apparent, very quickly, that there was something wrong in Quarry’s settlement.

It was quiet, but not the quiet of the falling snow.  Instead, dead silence.  The windows of the houses to either side of them were dark, and Promethean could tell that there was no life inside of them.

“Saint,” she said.  “Listen.”

“What?” He caught her up in a few steps, but his voice was sharp.

“It’s a ghost town.”

“No.” He looked to either side, tracking the darkened doorways on either side of them.  “Fuck it.  It can’t be.”

“Something happened here.”  She was tense and listening.  The snow muffled sound, but she could hear the creaking of wind in the cliffs. No life.  And it was coming down thick enough, now, to obscure even her vision.

“It could be just—an emergency at the mines.  Everyone called to work.”  But Saint didn’t sound certain.  “It could just be that.  If we turn back now…”

“We need to figure out if any of the colonists are still alive.”

He looked at her appraisingly.  “I was going to say that if we turn back now we’ll freeze to death before tomorrow. I need better clothes, at least.”

“Okay. We keep under cover. We don’t know if there’s still danger.”

Saint drew his gun, and Promethean shivered.

“Saint, wait.  We can’t afford to get into a shoot-out, especially not with another parahuman.” What she meant was that she couldn’t afford it.  If it came to a fight to the death, she’d have to put herself in the middle.  “I’m not going to be able to back you up without my equipment.”

“If there’s trouble, one gun’s still better than none.”

She sighed.  “Please promise me that you won’t shoot until there’s no alternative.”

Saint nodded, and they walked into the town that way, hugging the east side of the street where the wind hadn’t blown the snow into such high drifts. She tested the doors on one or two houses, but whatever had happened in Quarry’s settlement had apparently left the townspeople with enough time to lock their doors behind them. The wind moaned, and still, there was no sign of other life around them.  Some way into town, a stray dog appeared in the street, only to run when it saw them.

Promethean was waiting for the bodies to appear.

And then Saint bent double beside her, gasping, his hands going slack on his gun.

“What’s wrong?”  There hadn’t been any shots, but she was pulling him upright already, hands in his shirt, checking for blood or broken bones or any of the hundred thousand wounds that a parahuman ability could inflict.  His heart was beating like a captured bird.

“I can’t—I can’t.  Something’s wrong. It’s gone so wrong.” Hyperventilating. And then, just as suddenly as the first change, his face turned into a snarl, and it was only because she was watching that Promethean caught his arm before he turned on her with the gun. He cursed her as she locked out his elbow, used her strength and the weight of her body to pull his arm straight and keep the gun pointed away from her and him both.  He spat and fought her, and when she reached for the gun his fingers tensed around the trigger, sending lasers into the cobblestones in front of them.  She had to peel his fingers off it one by one.

“Fuck you,” said Saint as she bent back his thumb.  “Fuck you.”

She looped the gun through her belt one-handed, and Saint took that moment to swing at her with his free hand.  Slow. She saw it coming, swept his foot so that he fell flat into the snow.  She had a skein of cord in her utility belt, but she had to keep one hand on his wrist, her knee in the small of his back, and if he kept fighting her he was going to hurt himself, and she was going to have to let him go.

“Saint.” She found the cord, kept her voice level.  “You’re under the influence of a Master effect.  I’m going to tie your hands to keep you from hurting yourself.  I know you’re going to want to fight me.  Calm down.  Just calm down.”

Talking didn’t help.  He got one foot under himself, tried to elbow her with his left arm when she bent his right wrist to tie it.  When his second attempt grazed her ribs she almost cursed him back.  But then she had his hands tied and that meant that she could hold him on the length of cord and draw the gun with her free hand.

“We’re going, okay?” Promethean shouted into the storm. “Whoever you are, we just want to leave.”

As if in answer, Saint, on his feet now, spun and charged her with his head lowered like a bull’s.

She was faster than him.  She skipped backwards, pulling the cord taut between them, and Saint slipped and skidded on the slick surface of the road.  Slipped too completely: he couldn’t catch himself with his hands tied behind his back, and she had to step in close and catch him to keep him from cracking his skull on a doorstep.  He bit her hand, but she got one arm around his chest and began to drag him bodily back down the street.

And at that moment the street spun crazily, and she was left staggering in a smooth shallow crater scooped out of the stone of the road. Saint had slumped to his knees, all the tension gone out of him, like a discarded doll.

“Fuck,” he said.  He was gasping. “We are so completely fucked.”

Promethean raised the gun and scanned the darkened windows for signs of movement. There, in that alley. A shadow.  She aimed at where the person casting it would be standing, just out of sight.

“We don’t want to fight you,” she called.  “Just let us go.”

“No can do,” said a voice, amplified and distorted.  From the direction of the alley, and too far away to be the person whose shadow Promethean could see.  A girl’s voice.  Something inside her tightened, tensed her grip on the gun.

Colin had told her that they were all dead.

“You’re interesting, you know,” the girl went on.  “I couldn’t sense you at all from the cliffs. Still can’t, even this close. It’s like you don’t even have _feelings_. I’ve never met anyone like that before.”

Promethean shot the shadow in the alley.  The laser cracked cobblestone, and the hidden person yelped and scrambled back. Not hurt, she was sure. She’d been aiming to miss.

“Huh,” said the voice, and Saint tensed beside her.  “I don’t think you really want to do that.”

A cry of anguish—Saint.  And then he was on his knees and trying to beat his forehead against the cobblestones. She grabbed him, had him in a headlock, and he thrashed and fought her again.

“I’m interested in you,” said the voice.  “I won’t kill you if you’re useful.  So drop the gun.”

Promethean sighted down the alley again, still holding on to Saint.

“Hey loverboy,” the voice called.  “I’ve got an idea!  Is your girlfriend the type to shoot hostages?”

Saint moaned.

“Yeah, _didn’t_ think so. Quarry, why don’t you go get her gun?”

A woman in her forties stepped out of the alley.  She was small, stocky, and her face was grim under greying hair. But she radiated confidence, even as Promethean tracked her movements with the gun, her finger on the trigger.

“You might recognize Quarry, if you’ve come through this way before,” said the voice from the alley.  “She used to run this settlement, but she’s working for me now.  She even likes it.  When I tell her to.”

Quarry herself had a gun at her side, but she didn’t draw it. She gestured, and the ground shook, throwing Promethean to her knees and loosening her grip on Saint. It didn’t matter now, anyway. He’d gone limp in her hold, barely breathing. She knew she hadn’t hurt him, although his chin was beginning to bruise where he’d dashed his head against the ground. 

She was fairly sure his apathy would end the moment she decided to take a shot at Quarry.

Now there were only ten yards between them.

She tried to pull the trigger, and every joint in her hand locked up.

She gritted her teeth.  There were rules, she knew, and if she could find the right rule, she’d be able to fire the gun. She knew, for instance, that joining or the Slaughterhouse Nine authorized an automatic kill order. Even if the membership was coerced. It should have been enough to let her pull the trigger.

But that had been under the Protectorate, and the Protectorate had been dissolved. The Wardens, meanwhile, had pardoned Bonesaw, the only surviving member of the Nine.

The only _known_ surviving member.

Quarry was only three yards away, now.

Promethean closed her eyes.  If she didn’t look at the woman coming towards her, if she didn’t think about what she was doing, if she only fired the gun, as if into the empty air…no. She couldn’t move her finger on the trigger.

She could run and she might get away, but she couldn’t leave Saint. She could survive a gunshot, if Quarry fired on her, but he couldn’t.

She couldn’t _choose_. Not between a mass murderer and a civilian. She couldn’t decide that one would have to die to save the other.  Not without orders.  She couldn’t make the call.

That was probably what Richter had wanted, when he wrote her.

Quarry’s hand gripped her wrist.  She cupped the gun between them, pointed at her breast.  Not afraid.  Smiling, even. Then she peeled Promethean’s fingers off the gun, gently, and took it out of her hand.

She spun Promethean by her shoulders, then, and pulled her hands behind her back. She could fight, she knew, as a pair of metal cuffs clicked around her wrists, but she couldn’t win anything. Couldn’t hurt Quarry. Couldn’t run.  Couldn’t choose.  And the moment she lashed out, the Master hiding in the alley would strike Saint with another round of suicidal despair, and her choices would shrink further.

“There now,” said the voice from the alley.  ‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

Shadows moved in the alley, and unfolded into two human shapes and one vast inhuman one.  A woman with long braided hair and dull eyes, dressed in an ankle-length skirt and a heavy anorak. A shadow accompanied her, a vast, roiling mass of darkness with a snake’s skull for a head.

And the third one.  A teenaged girl with a bleached strip in her dark bangs, a microphone clipped to the collar of her leather jacket.  She smiled at Promethean.

“Hi. I’m Cherish.  I used to have a number, too, when my friends cloned me, but now I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one of me left.  So, usually I would just read you to see whether you’re useful or not, but the funny thing is, I _can’t._   So you’ll have to tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

Promethean bit her lip.

“ _He_ thinks you’re useful, you know,” Cherish continued, conversationally, gesturing at Saint. “Although it’s all tied up in how much he wants to fuck you.  It’s hard to tell when I can’t read you directly.  So, boyfriend.  Why don’t _you_ tell me why I shouldn’t kill her?”

Saint looked up.  Drew a breath.

“Don’t,” said Promethean.

“Uh-uh,” said Cherish.  “I’m asking him.”

“She’s a Tinker,” said Saint.  “With a broad specialization.  She can do ships, and time effects, and healing serum.  That I’ve seen.”

“See?” said Cherish, spreading her arms.  “That’s _useful_. There’s no reason you had to make it so hard on yourself.  And if you behave, I won’t even feed _him_ to Moord Nag’s pet.  I’m assuming you want him alive, that is.  Can’t tell, since I can’t look.  Got it?”

“I’ve got it,” said Promethean.

Cherish gestured to Quarry, and the woman pulled Saint up form the ground and tested the cord around his wrists to make sure it was tight.

“Follow me,” said Cherish.  “If you run, I’ll let Scavenger catch you this time.”

Promethean fell in step beside Saint, Cherish walking ahead, Quarry and Moord Nag with her pet behind.  Saint’s face was dull, expressionless, and she wasn’t sure if that was Cherish’s work or just shock.

“You couldn’t shoot them, Promethean?” he murmured.  “Just this once?”

“I’m sorry, Saint,” she said.  She could hear the tremor in her own voice. “I am so, so fucking sorry.”


	14. Chapter 14

Saint couldn’t think.  The snow was coming down blindingly in front of him, so thick it felt like a veil pulled over his eyes, and his hands burned with the cold, and his throat was tight with guilt or anguish or something else.  Some heaviness that made him want to lie down in the snow until it covered him. Promethean walked silently next to him, her head hanging.  Moord Nag’s shadow loomed behind him, its presence charging the air with some strange current that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

His mind wasn’t his own.  He knew it, but knowing didn’t help.  It was like the days after Teacher’s power had faded from him, after the spark of knowledge, the shimmering clarity with which he saw and understood Dragon’s code, was gone, and he was left with only the darkness of his own mind and his stuttering, clumsy, heavy-limbed body.  Useless, again.

Cherish could play with him like a puppet.  He watched her, walking in front of them through the snow, and wished her dead.  He hated himself for wishing it.

The hate, also, felt real. 

It occurred to Saint to wonder whether, if he’d only been looking in the right direction, he could have seen this Cherish on one of Dragon’s screens during the hunt for the Nine, and stopped her.

Cherish opened a door and her two slaves herded him and Promethean through it. The sensation of Scavenger’s presence at his back was enough to hurry him through the door.  Quarry took Promethean by the elbow when she hesitated, and pushed her after him.

Inside, Quarry muscled Promethean down a hallway lit by storm lanterns and into a stone room with a heavy desk and a fire burning in the hearth. A gesture from Quarry and a nearly imperceptible ripple through the stone floor, and Promethean was kneeling in front of the desk.  Saint grimaced, and Scavenger’s skull-like face—it resembled a cat’s, now—was suddenly snapping at him. He knelt, quickly, almost falling with his hands tied behind his back.

The shadow loomed over him.

“Moord Nag,” said Cherish.  “Stop it. Scavenger can’t eat him yet.”

A moment passed and the shadow didn’t draw back.  Saint, strangely calm, looked past it to its master, and saw a frown twist her face suddenly, as if she were about to cry. The shadow slunk back and wrapped itself around her, serpentine.  Saint shuddered when he saw how its flesh roiled and seemed to steam where it touched Moord Nag’s skin.

“Good,” said Cherish, and she reached out and ran a hand over Moord Nag’s braids, careful not to touch Scavenger’s flesh.  The woman closed her eyes and sighed.

“So,” Cherish went on, turning to face Promethean.  It was strange how diminutive she looked, in the office with the two parahumans at her command.  How harmless. “This is a little bit awkward, because I can’t actually trust you not to sabotage whatever I have you working on. I think a ship would be pretty cool, but it would _suck_ if I gave you the materials and you tried to blow up your workshop or contact the Wardens or something like that.  I guess I could set some hostages up to watch you and kill your friend if anything goes wrong, but I’d like to be more certain than that.  I…hm.  Quarry, do we still have that precog your old boss sent?  You stuck him down the mineshaft, right?  You didn’t feed him to Scavenger?”

“He’s in the mine with the rest of the settlers,” said Quarry.

“Cool. Social precog is kind of useless when you can just read people’s emotions, you know?  But maybe I can use him after all.”

“I can unblock the mine shaft and fetch him, if you want him,” said Quarry. Her demeanor was professional, almost military.  Saint wondered whether that calm went all the way through her core, or if there was some part of her inside that was screaming.

“Do that,” said Cherish.  “And we’ll want to start setting up a workshop for our friend.  So that would mean we’ll be here for a few more days than we planned.”

She frowned at that, twirling the bleached strip of hair between her fingers.

“On the one hand, that could mean we pick up a few more of Teacher’s people, if he sends anyone more interesting than the little precog. On the _other_ hand, there’s always my stupid family and the Invisible Girl to think about. I know Simon’s been skulking around the cliff at the edge of my range, but I’d rather delay the whole reunion, you know?” Cherish’s eyes glittered in the firelight.

Moord Nag said something in Afrikaans and gestured to Promethean. Saint saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick, the skin around them ashen and raw-looking.

“What?” said Cherish.

Moord Nag spoke again and pointed to Promethean’s utility belt.

“Oh, her _belt!”_ said Cherish. “I wish you’d work on your English. Quarry, take it off her. She might have something useful in it."

A succession of expressions passed over Moord Nag’s face, too quickly to read, before her face grew dull again.  She swallowed and pursed her lips experimentally.

“Sorry, Cherish.”  The words were a whisper.

Saint shivered as Quarry unbuckled Promethean’s utility belt and began emptying its contents onto the desk.  Cherish pawed through them idly, and Quarry, without being asked, turned to Saint and began patting down his pockets.

“What are these?”  Cherish held up a trio of clear vials.

“Regeneration serum.”  Promethean’s voice was expressionless.  When Saint glanced at her, he saw that her eyes were on the floor and her lips pressed into a tight line.  He was swaying as warmth returned painfully returned to his numb hands and feet, but Promethean held herself perfectly still.

“Neat.” Cherish pocketed the vials, then turned and looked at Promethean consideringly.  “Medical tinkers are cool.  Maybe we can get you to do some more copies of my old friends, if I can get the material. Or, _oh._ Maybe you can reverse your immunity, if you want.  That would be convenient.”

Promethean sighed.

“I could try.”  Her voice was soft, and the tone revealed nothing. Saint felt a knot of frustration tighten in his chest when he saw how Cherish smiled.  Then Cherish cocked her head as if she was listening for a distant noise.

“Hey, Quarry, we’ve got company.  More of Teacher’s people.  They always sound so _flat._   They think they’re coming for a fight, this time.”

Teacher’s people.  Saint remembered the ships that had pursued them across the Waste and felt a flicker of hope. But no.  Even if they arrived in full force, Cherish’s power would render the pilots useless more effectively than Promethean had.

“They shouldn’t be a problem, should they?” asked Quarry.

“Nope.” Cherish giggled.  “If we stash these two, we can clean them up in a couple minutes.  Maybe Teacher sent us something good!  It’s nice of him not to catch on when his first messenger disappeared.”

“We emptied the cells in the basement when we fed Scavenger,” said Quarry. “We can keep these two there until we’ve rounded up Teacher’s people.”

Quarry pulled Promethean up and left Saint to struggle to his feet on his own. Cherish led them into the corridor and down two flights of stairs.  It was cold in the basement, and a pale lighting strip on the ceiling illuminated a row of cells with heavy doors and inset barred windows. Quarry unlocked the third.

“In,” said Cherish.  Saint felt the ground swelling under him to push him through the door. Promethean stumbled after him, and the lock clicked behind her.  The feeble light that filtered in from the hallway showed Cherish’s face at the window.

“Don’t go anywhere, now, okay?”

There was darkness as Scavenger’s shape passed in front of the light, and then only the sound of footsteps growing fainter.

Saint could hear Promethean’s indrawn breath as the door to the stairwell swung shut.  The filtered light from the corridor highlighted the lines of her face.  Her shoulders were hunched, as if she were drawing inwards into herself. As if she’d noticed him watching, she lowered her head and cast her face into shadow.

Saint sank to the floor.  He didn’t know if the apathy that filled him was Cherish’s work or his own. He thought that if he spoke he’d hear the stammer that had dogged him in the days after Teacher’s power faded. He had the same heaviness in his limbs now, as if he could move only at another’s will.

A muffled noise from Promethean, and a gasp as she lost her balance and fell to the ground, kicking.

“What are you doing?”  No, he didn’t stammer.  His voice didn’t sound like he felt anything at all.

“Trying to get the cuffs off,” she gasped.  Looking closer in the dim light, Saint realized that what he’d originally taken for her defeated posture was actually an attempt to contort her spine far enough to slide her cuffed hands over her hips and pass her legs through the chain.  As she was now, with astonishing flexibility, doing, her knees pulled tight to her chest.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.  “I don’t want Cherish to come running back here to see what’s up.”

She got one foot through the linked cuffs, then the other. Then she pulled her sleeves down to protect her wrists, bent and put one foot on the chain, and wrenched at the cuffs until the chain snapped.  She stood and rubbed her wrists.

Saint wondered where she found the willpower.  The door was still locked.

“Think depressing thoughts, okay?”

Her voice was resolutely bright.  Saint found himself suppressing a snarl.  As if she knew what it felt like to be puppeted from inside your own head. He flinched at the thought almost as soon as he’d had it, remembering how he’d turned his gun on her in the snow. How he’d struggled in her hold and imagined tearing into her throat with his teeth.  It made him sick, now, and he wasn’t even sure that the sickness was his own.

“Must be nice to be immune to Cherish.”

Promethean spun and kicked the door.  It shook on its hinges.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to break that down, Promethean.”

“Good. Keep up that outlook. We need more time.” The same forced cheerful tone.

A thought came to him.

“ _Why_ are you immune to Cherish?”

She hit the door again instead of answering.

“You fucked with your own brain somehow, didn’t you?”

He knew the idea should have caused him revulsion.  Of _course_ Tinker abilities didn’t usuallycome with no need for sleep and inhuman multitasking abilities.

He wondered how he hadn’t noticed.

Promethean’s breath was coming a little bit faster, now.  “Can we drop that subject and just agree that it would be _really bad_ if Cherish got access to my tech?”

“What exactly did you do to yourself, Promethean?”

She looked at him, and her expression in the half-light was unreadable.

“Nothing,” she said.  “I did nothing. I just _am_ this way.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“Good. If you start feeling reassured, we’re fucked.  Cherish can’t notice that I’m trying something.”

She was pulling thick splinters from the cracked wood of the door now, and although Saint could see the muscles in her back working through the fabric of her jumpsuit, he was sure that it wasn’t simple human strength that was prevailing against the solid wood.

Which wasn’t unheard of.  There had been other Tinkers who’d used their powers to alter their physical bodies.

The door collapsed.

“Come on.”

She pulled him bodily to his feet and untied his hands. Saint swayed.

“We need to run.”  She tugged at his wrist.

Saint felt his breath leave him, looking at her hand on his wrist. Despair.  Good.  He was supposed to feel despair.

“You need to run,” he said.

“What? Come on.”  She was pulling him forward, and he had to brace his hand against the wall to keep from stumbling after her.

“If I come with you, Cherish can track us.  There’s no way we can get out of her range before she notices that I’m running.  But if you leave with me, you might actually get away.”

He met her eyes then.  Saw the fear written on her face.

“I can’t leave you, Saint.”

“You have to.” He supposed it was the despair that was keeping his voice calm, making him able to meet her eyes.  “You were right.  Cherish with access to your tech is a disaster.  You can’t let that happen.”

She shook her head.  “No. No, I _can’t_ leave you.  I—shit. Shit.  Please don’t do this.  _Please_ don’t make me wait here for her to come back.”

She pressed her hands to her face, but he could see her shoulders shaking. He couldn’t tell if she was crying. He pushed her back into the corridor.

“You have to come with me.”  She took a deep breath and met his eyes.  When she took his wrist this time, Saint didn’t resist.

“You know you’re going to get both of us killed?”  But his heart was sinking.  She couldn’t leave, she’d said.  Not that she wouldn’t.  He wished she’d turn away, drop his hand, prove him wrong.

“I know,” said Promethean, her voice soft. “I’m _sorry_. But I can’t do it the other way.”

She pulled him through the doorway and down the corridor.

Up the stairs after her and then down the corridor and into the snow. He was panting already, the terror rising in his throat, blind panic beating around his head on invisible wings. He gasped.  Promethean’s hand around his wrist was like a vise, her fingers hot against his skin, and she was dragging him onwards, even though Cherish was coming, he could feel it, he could feel the breath of Moord Nag’s shadow on his back, and he knew that any minute they’d be on him, and running was useless, but she pulled him on and he followed her.

The snow was burning cold on his face.   He couldn’t tell where they were going, was letting Promethean pick their direction.  As he’d been doing since they met, he thought.  She made the choices, and he reacted.  If she wanted to save him from Teacher or from Dragon, she’d save him, and if she changed her mind, she’d turn him over.  What did he know about her motivations, really?  What did he know about her past?

Nothing. Only guesses, and here he was about to let her get him killed.  He couldn’t trust her.  He tried to break out of her grip or pull her to a stop, but she hauled him forward and wrapped both her hands around his arm and dragged him along.

It might not be so bad to go back to Cherish. It hadn’t been with Teacher. Just oblivion, the numb relief of having everything decided in advance.  All he had to do was stop and fall to his knees in the snow.

What did it matter, even, if it was Cherish herself who had put that thought in his head?  He’d never know the difference, when it came down to it.

A dark shape rose up before them through the snow.  An auroch’s skull on a misshapen body.  Scavenger.  Larger now, he thought, than when he’d last laid eyes on it.  It fed on death.

Promethean pulled him to a halt.  The ground shook and bulged into a series of small hills behind them, cutting off their escape.  Saint had to grab Promethean’s arm to keep from falling.

“Saint,” Promethean whispered.  “I need you to go back the way we came.  Turn right at the first intersection, and keep heading in that direction. You’ll make it to the cliff face.”

Cherish’s voice came through the snow.  “I’m really disappointed that you tried to run.  I thought you were smarter than that.”

Saint took a breath.  He couldn’t think. He was afraid, angry, but mostly he just wanted to lie down in the snow and let them do whatever they were going to do to him.  He knew the sort of things that Cherish liked to do.  The sort of things that she could make other people like to do.

“Go,” said Promethean.  “Go now.”

That wasn’t what was supposed to happen.

“I can’t leave you.”

“You’re taking too long to decide,” said Cherish.  “Do I have to give you an incentive to think faster?”

The despair came over Saint like a wave of nausea.  It was sickening to be inside his own skin. He remembered everything he’d felt in the past hour, everything he’d thought.  How ready he’d been to accept that he’d become a pawn in Cherish’s hands. Just like with Teacher. Stupid of him to go back, stupid and cowardly, but then, that was all that he was.  Half an hour ago he’d wanted to wrap his hands around Promethean’s throat and squeeze until her body went limp.  He would have liked it.  It didn’t matter if that was Cherish.  He would have liked it.

He was screaming, he realized, and his hands were clawing at his face and his eyes.  Trying to, anyway. Promethean’s hands were around his wrists, forcing his hands down.

“Okay,” she called.  “You win. Cut it out.  I’ll come back.”

A breath, and then another.  The hatred receded, incrementally, and even that slight relief was so strong Saint though he might vomit.

Promethean let him go.

“I’m coming to you,” she called, hands up.  “Just don’t do anything to him.”

She stepped away from him, crossing the distance towards the shadow. Saint could make out the three human shapes around it.  Cherish, Quarry, Moord Nag.

“I don’t think you understand how this works,” said Cherish, brightly. “You don’t actually have anything to bargain with.  You got one chance to come quietly, and you fucked it up.  Quarry.”

And the settlement’s former leader stepped forward through the snow, gun drawn, and fired two shots.

He felt his kneecap shatter at the first.  There was a moment when he didn’t see, didn’t think, and then he was on the ground and Promethean had closed the distance between herself and Quarry and had the other woman’s gun in her hand and her arm twisted painfully behind her back. She fired at Cherish, and Cherish screamed.

But there wasn’t any blood, Saint realized, as if in a dream. She’d missed.  Or she’d aimed wide.  His own blood was staining the snow.  It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should, which might mean he was in shock.

Cherish was still screaming, although Saint couldn’t tell if it was in rage or fright.  Moord Nag’s shadow charged, and Promethean dropped the gun and barely ducked out of the way of the auroch’s horns, dragging Quarry after her.

But she wasn’t fast enough.  Scavenger fed on the dead, and it killed what it touched.  As it passed her, it turned, and the shadowy substance of its body engulfed Promethean and Quarry together.  Where it touched them, it seethed, and Quarry screamed as its insubstantial flesh erupted into hundreds of tendrils which seized her and pulled her further into its darkness.  Where it touched her, it flayed flesh from bone.  The shadow’s flesh poured into her open mouth, and her scream choked off.

But Promethean was still fighting it, miraculously.  The shadow roiled around her, and she thrashed and yelled and finally tore herself free.  Not bloody, Saint realized. Not injured.  He’d been so certain of her death that he wasn’t sure what he was seeing.

She stumbled away from the shadow’s substance, gasping, beating at a tendril that had adhered to her face and was trying to flood her mouth and choke her.

And in the moment that Promethean was blind, the shadow turned its head and threw itself at her.  It caught her torso in its horns, and Saint heard her scream as, with a twist of its head, it ripped her open from neck to navel and tossed her aside like a doll.


	15. Chapter 15

Promethean was on fire.  The shadow had ripped through the synthetic nerves that connected her skin to her cybernetics, and the damage felt like firecrackers—a percussive, crackling pain. The skin hung off her chest in strips under her torn jumpsuit, showing the robotics beneath, and where the shadow’s flesh had touched her, her skin felt oily and hot again the cold snow.

Saint was yelling.  She had to get up. She isolated the subroutines that were relaying her pain, shut them off.  The sudden cessation of pain was almost dizzying.  She braced her hands on the ground and kipped up, staggering a little on the landing.

No major damage to her mobility.  The shadow had broken a few circuits in her chest, including one that controlled her breathing, so that her apparent ribcage rose and fell unevenly, the left side glitching and shuddering.  She shut that off, too.

Cherish was yelling through the snow.

“Shit, shit, she’s not dead, kill her!”

The shadow turned round, disgorging Quarry’s empty clothes from its flesh. Promethean could see Moord Nag shaking her head in confusion, the way her posture changed as Cherish went on yelling. The shadow tossed its head, turned on Saint, until Cherish pointed at her.  Moord Nag spun, and the shadow charged.   Promethean threw herself to the ground, rolled and lunged back to her feet.  She’d just missed being speared again on its horns, and a tendril of its flesh had caught her and clung viscously to her arm.

But she could see that her guess in Quarry’s office had been right. Without a language in common, Cherish couldn’t give Moord Nag direct orders.  Instead, she was adjusting the woman’s emotions, feeding her enough anger and fear to make her lash out at any target Cherish indicated.

Cherish’s targets built up immunity to her power over time. Cherish might have planned to alter Moord Nag’s brain slowly to the point that the warlord felt lasting affection for her, but her reliance on manipulating her feelings to give her orders meant that her control was weaker, unreliable.  It took long moments before Moord Nag responded to Cherish’s commands.

Good. Promethean grinned as she dodged the shadow’s onslaught again, numb to the cold and her torn skin. That was much better than she’d expected. 

Cherish was backing towards the mouth of an alley, scrambling over the hills that Quarry had raised with her power.  Saint was sprawled in the snow, bleeding—but she couldn’t fix that. She couldn’t tell if Cherish was using her power on him, and she couldn’t afford to think about it. She needed to keep Cherish frightened and unbalanced. 

She needed Cherish to believe that she was too big of a threat to be kept on a leash. Someone who could cheat her power, who could break out of any cell they put her in, and survive an attack by Scavenger. Someone who could kill. If Cherish calmed down enough to think, if she managed to force another stalemate and read answers about Promethean’s restrictions from Saint the way she had when she’d first confronted them, then she’d have everything she needed to control her.

That couldn’t happen.

And anyway, Cherish had the vials of regeneration serum in her jacket, Promethean remembered.  She couldn’t fix Saint’s injuries if she couldn’t get them back.

She dodged the shadow again, trying to close the distance between her and Cherish.  Scavenger was blocking her, shifting shape, becoming long and serpentine, trying to circle her in its coils. It rose up in front of her and struck like a cobra, and she only just dodged.  Quarry’s death had made it quick, stronger.

Cherish was standing on the top of Quarry’s hill now.  Watching the scene.  Catching her breath.

It was taking too long, and Promethean could hear Saint repeating something softly to himself in a tone that sounded very much like the work of Cherish’s power. She clenched her fists, and when Scavenger blocked her path again she let the shadow’s flesh engulf her and charged through it.

The interior of its body was warm, not solid, but sticky, like spider’s webs or old grease, and it dampened her sight and her hearing and her sense of smell, so that it felt abruptly as if all of her senses except for the sickening texture of it had disappeared.  Her sense of direction was gone.  She knew her feet were on the ground, but she couldn’t feel any sense of impact as she struggled to run in the darkness.

And then she was back in the daylight and the shadow flesh was sprouting off tendrils and attempting to pull her back into its mass.

She was ready, this time, when the snake’s head came round to snap at her, and she threw herself down and rolled and was back up in an instant and sprinting for Cherish, whose eyes widened as she saw her coming.

Promethean caught Cherish by her arm as she tried to run, spun her round and grabbed her by the jaw—not choking her, but, she hoped, creating the impression that she was about to start doing so.  Cherish struggled and kicked and tried to pry her thumb back with both hands, but Promethean was stronger.  She put her face close to her Cherish’s and smiled.

“I’m going to peel your skin off inch by inch while you scream.”

Cherish did scream, at that, and Scavenger’s shape reared up over the hill and struck at Promethean.  She threw herself and Cherish to the ground, and then she was up and dragging the girl facedown by her wrists as she kicked and yelled herself hoarse. Scavenger drew back for another strike, and Promethean hauled Cherish up and away from the shadow, and saw that at the bottom of the hill Moord Nag’s face was contorted with rage. She couldn’t let Cherish see how close the shadow still was, so she pushed her down into the snow and threw herself after her and held her there while Cherish thrashed and tried to scratch her eyes out, calling for help and for Moord Nag to kill her. Promethean could feel the shadow at her back, and her restrictions were about to force her to try and get Cherish away, but she waited until the last moment before she wrenched Cherish up and tried to run.

Scavenger caught her arm in its jaws before she’d taken two steps. But she’d had that arm around Cherish, and as the shadow wrenched her backwards and into the air it took Cherish with her, slick tendrils of its flesh closing around her face and shoulders. Her screams redoubled, real pain now instead of fear, and Promethean saw the way her skin seemed to bubble and seethe as the creature devoured her, swelling to pull her into its flesh. Promethean struggled in the shadow’s jaws, and at the bottom of the hill, she saw Moord Nag smile as the last of Cherish disappeared from sight.

Then the warlord raised a hand, and Scavenger snapped its head back and shook Promethean like a dog worrying a rabbit.  She felt circuits in her arm break, the shadow’s strength crushing her robotics, and then it slammed her into the ground and held her down in its coils while it wrenched at the arm with its teeth.  She’d cut off her sensitivity to the pain as soon as it had grabbed her, but she could feel the damage it was doing.  She imagined that when it crushed her arm completely it would try to tear the rest of her limb from limb.

She fought, silently.  And then a gunshot rang out through the snow, and the shadow’s jaws first slackened and then disintegrated entirely.

Promethean pressed her cheek into the soft cold of the snow, cradling her damaged arm.  Not breathing. She’d shut off her breathing.

Saint had found Quarry’s gun.

She still needed the regeneration serum.  She crawled to where Cherish’s empty clothes were strewn through the snow and rifled one handed through the pockets until she found the vials. Then she scrambled back down the hill to where Saint waited.  Past Moord Nag’s body, blood pooling in the snow from the gunshot wound in her head.

Saint was lying in the snow, a trail of blood behind him where he’ clearly dragged himself to the gun, unable to get his legs under him. His face was pale, marked with scratches that she knew had to be self-inflicted.  As if he’d dug his nails into his face until he broke skin.

He struggled to sit up when he saw her coming, grimacing as the effort jostled his bad leg.  Promethean held the vials up to the light with her good hand.

“I got the regen serum back from Cherish,” she said.

Slowly, Saint raised the gun until it was pointed at her, bracing his arms on his one good knee to hold them steady.

“Don’t come any closer,” he said.

She stopped in the snow and wished she hadn’t shut off her breathing. It was reassuring, to be able to breath. Human-like, and therefore safe.

“Don’t be an idiot, Saint,” she said.

The look on his face was ugly.

“I trusted you.  I promised not to pry into your secrets.  And you played me. Dragon.” 

The name, in his mouth, was a curse.

“I’m not Dragon,” said Promethean.

“No?” He shook his head. “I did guess Defiant had a copy saved somewhere.  He wasn’t nearly upset enough when you died.”

She felt herself stiffen, involuntarily.

“That’s not true.”

“So he didn’t load you for comparison’s sake and then decide he preferred the edited version?”

“Fuck you, Saint.”  Her hand tensed around the vials of regeneration serum.  It would be so satisfying, she knew, to break them.

Saint grinned, and on his bloodied face the expression looked like a snarl. He was _enjoying_ how much he was getting to her, she realized.

Knowing didn’t make her any less angry.

Saint’s eyes narrowed, his hand tensing almost imperceptibly on the gun’s trigger.

“Put your hands on your head and turn around.”

“Or you’ll shoot me?”  She raised her eyebrows.  He could shoot her and she wouldn’t feel it.  She’d shut down all her pain processing.

It might almost be worth the damage to see his face when she didn’t flinch. Almost.

Saint smiled, but he was looking at something over her shoulder.

“Do what I said, Promethean.  Hands on your head and turn around.”

“My left arm’s broken.  I can’t raise it.” But she put her right hand behind her head and she turned, slowly, to see what he was looking at.

Two men were climbing over the top of Quarry’s hill, dressed in white power armor, but barefaced, not masked like capes. They carried heavy guns, and if the armor looked just a little bit shoddy, the guns were high quality. They looked wary and angry and as if they’d just finished with a fight.  Promethean felt herself go numb.

Teacher’s people.  Cherish hadn’t killed all of them.  And she’d been so sure that she could deal with Saint.

“You’re going to want to stand back and keep your guns on her,” Saint called. “She’s Dragon.”

Teacher’s men tensed, and she was looking down the barrels of two guns. Trapped, with Saint still behind her.

“Are you the last of Teacher’s men?” Saint asked.

The older soldier, a man with a greying beard, nodded.

“We think so.  Cherish got us separated, in the snow.  She was picking us off one by one, turning us against each other.”

Saint sighed.  “I’m sorry for your loss. But you’d better get her under control. You have restraints?”

It was the younger man who nodded, this time.

“Put your gun down before you get close to her,” said Saint. “She’s fast enough to disarm you before you can shoot, if you get within her reach.  She’s strong enough to snap a normal pair of handcuffs, too, so you’ll have to watch her even after she’s secured.”

Promethean gritted her teeth as she watched the younger man put down his gun and began to walk towards her.

She’d almost resigned herself, with Cherish, when she’d been desperate and afraid and it had seemed so much better simply not to be taken alive. But this was unfair. She’d dealt with Cherish. She’d won.

She couldn’t let herself fall into Teacher’s hands.

She was tensing to move when the gunshot rang out, and the bearded soldier crumpled to the ground in his armor.  Shot in the head.   Promethean threw herself at the other soldier, who was already backing up and stumbling and trying to get back to his gun.  He went down under her weight, and she shielded him with her body and scrabbled for his handcuffs and hoped that Saint wasn’t going to try to shoot him through her, the idiot.

She should have realized when he’d told the second soldier to put his gun down.  Of course he knew that she couldn’t use it even if she did disarm him.

She got the handcuffs away from the soldier and fastened them around his wrists. For good measure, she tore the casing off the control panel on the side of his armor.  It only took her a few moments to lock the joints in place and disable his internal controls.

She sat up and looked at Saint.  His face was almost gray with exhaustion, and the iridescent circuits of his tattoo were moving under his skin.  He’d turned it on so he’d be easy to recognize, she imagined.

“Thank you,” she said, although she didn’t particularly want to thank him.

He took a breath.  “I’m not happy with you. But I’m not a fucking idiot. I’m not going back to Teacher.”

His words were labored, breathless.  Promethean stepped towards him.

“Don’t.” His gun was aimed at her again.

She took another step.

“You can threaten to shoot me all you want, Saint.  You’re obviously bleeding out, and I’m not allowed to let you die.”

He didn’t lower the gun.  He kept it pointed at her all the way as she walked towards him, until she knelt down and took it out of his hand.

There’d been a syringe packed with the vials of regeneration serum. She loaded it, now, holding the vial awkwardly between her knees when she couldn’t manage with her damaged arm.

“Give me your hand,” she said to Saint.

“You should have let me shoot the second one,” said Saint, blearily. “Teacher’s going to want to kill us both when he finds out who you are.  He’ll send more people when these don’t come back.”

“You know I’m not allowed to do that, even if I wanted to.” She slipped the needle into his arm, and he tensed.

The scratches on his face healed, slowly.  He jerked and put a hand over his mouth as the shattered bones in his knee began to knit.

“You’re going to be pretty weak for a while,” Promethean said to him. “You need to lie down and rest, and I…”

She paused, poking the damaged cybernetics in her chest with her working right hand. 

“I need to patch myself up as best I can and go pull the survivors out of that mine shaft.”


	16. Chapter 16

On Earth H, the sun was shining through thick clouds, and the Pendragon was tracing a flight path to the last known destination of Dragon’s ship. Defiant opened a communication channel, and Dragon’s face appeared on one of the Pendragon’s monitors. He drew in a breath, despite himself.

He’d half expected her not to answer, when he called.

“Colin.” Her expression was carefully neutral, but her words sounded clipped, as if she were in pain or out of breath. “I can’t talk to you now. I’m in remote conference with the Wardens.”

He’d been relieved and afraid in equal parts when he saw her face, and now both feelings formed a knot somewhere beneath his rib cage.

“Are you alright?”  What he wanted to say was, _Are we alright?_ But he could have guessed the answer to that question even before he’d heard her voice.

On his screen, Dragon closed her eyes.

“I can’t have this conversation right now.  I’m sending you coordinates for the Melusine.  Goodbye, Colin.”

Her face disappeared, and flight coordinates for Dragon’s ship filled a second monitor to his left.  Defiant had already erased the data from the last day from the Pendragon’s logs, thoroughly enough that he hoped even Dragon wouldn’t be able to retrieve it. Not that he didn’t trust her.

Now he adjusted the Pendragon’s flight path.

He closed the vents in his helmet and tried to take deep breaths, feeling the inputs from the ship at the back of his mind.  The air outside was gray and humid.  It would rain soon.

He wondered what he’d do if she refused to speak to him when he reached the Melusine.

It wasn’t long until he could see the ship’s shape below him, the dragon’s whip-like tail curled around it.  Below it, half-camouflaged by trees, he could make out the white wings of the Pyrphoros.

He landed.  The walls of the Pendragon thrummed as he went through the series of eye movements that unlocked its doors.

Dragon was standing in the doorway of the Melusine.  Her hair fell in tangles over the shoulder plates of her armor. If she had been human, Defiant might have guessed that she hadn’t slept.  As it was, he could see that her eyes were clear, but when she looked at him she seemed to look straight through him.

He swallowed.  After a moment in which they faced each other and said nothing, he took off his helm and set it down behind him, inside the ship.

“Dragon.”

“I’ve talked to the Wardens.  They’re keeping Teacher’s students, for the moment, but they can’t spare the resources to hunt him down.  Politically or otherwise.” She pushed her hair back from her face with one hand, and the gesture made her look tired.  Defiant took another step towards her.

“Can we talk?”

“We’re talking, Colin.  Just say what you want to say.”

He held out his hands.  “I’m so sorry.”

He saw her shift, as if she was pulling into herself.

“Dragon,” he said, again.

“You’re not _nearly_ sorry enough,” she said, and for the first time he felt her looking at him, instead of through him. He met her gaze and tried not to let the tightness in his throat force him to look away.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You could start by telling me where you took her.  Where you took them.”

Defiant swallowed.  “I can’t do that.”

“Exactly.” He could see the series of tiny expressions that passed over her face, the way she pressed her lips together as if she were holding in whatever else she’d thought of saying.

“I promised her I wouldn’t tell you.”

“ _Exactly_ , Colin. So she gets away, and Saint goes free.”

He didn’t say anything.  Dragon stood perfectly still in her armor, her face turned away from him, but he could see the repressed energy in the way she held herself, the tension in her hands.

“You know, if it was just her, I could almost—” Dragon’s voice wavered, just slightly. She didn’t finish the sentence. “But you knew that she was with him, you knew she wanted him for something, and you _still_ —”

She balled her hands into fists, closed her eyes.  Colin wasn’t sure, if he crossed the space between them, whether she would push him away or let him hold her.  He didn’t move.

“I owed it to her, Dragon.  I—she trusted me, and I broke her trust.  I owed it to her.”

“And if she asks you for another favor?”

He remembered Promethean’s face, in the Pendragon, the eerie way that her expressions had mirrored Dragon’s.  Dragon’s face now, as she pointedly avoided his gaze, had that same hunted look.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Dragon sighed.  “Then I don’t know what to say to you.”

He drew a breath.  “I should tell you—I—she and I—”

The words came out rushed, almost unintelligible, and Dragon looked up at him sharply.  He felt himself grimace.

She wrapped her arms around herself and looked away.

“That too, then?”

“I’m sorry.  I know that doesn’t fix it. But I’m sorry.”

Dragon didn’t answer.  Colin let the silence stretch for a long time, not certain whether she expected him to say more.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” She shook her head, for emphasis, or as if she was trying to clear it.  “For a while…I wasn’t sure if you were coming back at all.”

“Of course I was coming back,” he said.

“It wasn’t obvious.”

“It wasn’t?  I thought you would know.”

Her face twisted.  “I didn’t.”

He stepped towards her, and she met him halfway and put her hands on his shoulders, pressing her forehead against the shoulder panel of his armor. Not embracing him. Just waiting, while he breathed and wondered what to do with his hands.  It felt wrong to put his arms around her.

“She doesn’t want to fight you, you know,” he said.

Dragon snorted.  “Then maybe she shouldn’t have teamed up with my enemy and fucked my boyfriend.”

Colin grimaced.  “That was…both of us. She was unhappy, and I…but she’s not looking for a way to take you down.  If she was…”

“I’d be dead already?”  Dragon looked up at him, her hands tensing, just slightly, on his shoulders. “Yes.  I do remember how she graciously declined to delete my personality, back in Dracheheim.  I was watching while it happened.”

“I wasn’t going to describe it quite that way.”

“Of course you weren’t.  But you don’t know what it’s like.  Put yourself in my place for a minute.  _Imagine_ if the person you were two years ago appeared and started trying to take back pieces of your life.  Can you understand why I’m freaked?”

“I was a very different person two years ago.”

She’d changed too, of course.  But when he thought of his self of two years ago, he thought of all the ways she’d saved him—how she’d rebuilt his body, how she’d given him a partnership and a mission and her love.  It had been Promethean, too, who’d done those things, before he’d ever altered Dragon’s code. And he’d loaded her and left her alone. He couldn’t explain the guilt that he felt, over that.

Dragon looked into his eyes for a long moment, frowning, and he couldn’t place the intensity of her expression.

“I need to know that you’re going to have my back, Colin,” she said at last. Very quietly.  “Even if it’s a question of me or her.  If—I need to know that you’ll have my back.”

He opened his mouth, and Dragon stopped him.

“Please don’t say you will if you can’t.  I’ll understand.  But I need to know.”

He drew a breath, put his hands on her shoulders.

“When I loaded her, when I thought that I might not speak to _you_ again, it felt like the end of the world. I—” He looked away from her, for a minute.  “I don’t even know how to say it without sounding insincere.  You’re the most important person in my life.  I want to say yes.  If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have to think about it.  But I look at her, and I see you.  So if what you’re asking is whether I can fight her, if it comes to that? I don’t know.  I don’t think I can.”

Dragon rested her forehead against the breastplate of his armor, her head tucked under his chin.

“Fuck.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.  Still.”

He put his arms around her, tentatively.  She stayed where she was, leaning against him.

“I’m still angry with you.  So you know.”

He nodded.

“I’m glad you came back.  I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

He ran his hands through her hair, combing out the tangles.

“What were you going to do with her, if you’d caught her?”

Dragon sighed.  “Put her somewhere where she couldn’t be a problem, I suppose.  Make sure she couldn’t reconnect her network access in a fit of recklessness and screw both of us over.  Take Saint away.  Nothing _that bad_ , actually.  Why?  Have you changed your mind?”

Colin shook his head.  “I did promise, remember?”

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

The rain that had been holding off all afternoon began to fall, in sheets. It was a warm shower, but it trickled straight down Colin’s neck and into his armor.

“Ugh,” he said, running a hand over the back of his head. “Will you let me inside your ship, or were you planning on changing the locks?”

Dragon snorted.  The rain was heavy enough that her hair was already plastered to her armor. 

“Come on.”  She took his arm.

Inside the Melusine, she rung out her wet hair on the floor. The door closed after him, and he caught her arm as she was turning back to look at him and kissed her.

“What was that for?”  But she was smiling.

“For not changing the locks.”

She looked away, at that, but he caught her expression. The way she bit her lip, as if she was in pain.

“ _Are_ you alright?”

She shrugged, not looking at him.

“Dragon.”

“It’s—I should—” She shook her head.  “I’m better with you here.  I am. But I’m not exactly alright.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know how to explain.  I—I watched through her memories.  All night. I couldn’t stop.”

He waited for her to go on, tucking a strand of her damp hair behind her ear. She turned her face so that her cheek was against his palm.

“I don’t know how to explain,” she said again.

“But you’d tell me, if there was something I could do? If there was something else that I _did_?”

She nodded.  “I’d tell you. It’s just…complicated.”

She shook her head after a moment, sending droplets of water flying from her hair, and stepped away.  He touched her shoulder, and she turned to look at him.  Smiled, again, as if nothing was wrong.

“Come to the command room?  I should brief you on what we’ve got from Teacher’s students and the breakdown of his ships. The ships don’t have direct access to the dimensional shift technology, but they _do_ have an interdimensional communications system, which is what they’re using to signal whoever is controlling the portal system. It’s all encrypted, of course, but once I break that, we’ll have access to Teacher’s communications with people outside his private world, and if we’re very lucky, the tech they’re using will be close enough to the original portal locking system for me to counterfeit it…”

She went on talking, and he followed behind her, guilty and relieved.


	17. Chapter 17

Saint sat up in bed with a start.  The room seemed to shift around him, and for a moment he thought he was back in Teacher’s compound—white walls, clean sheets, and that ever-present feeling of dizziness—but no.  He remembered. The snow, Cherish, the bullet. Promethean fighting in Scavenger’s jaws.

No. The robot.  The A.I.  Better if he thought of her that way.

Sunlight was streaming in through the windows, dazzlingly bright as it reflected off the snow outside.  He must have slept through both the afternoon and the night.

Saint stood, grimacing at the stiffness in the knee that Quarry had shot. He frowned more deeply when he saw the state of his clothes.  They were covered in blood.  He must have collapsed on the bed after Promethean helped him up the stairs without even bothering to undress.

After the robot helped him up the stairs, that was.

He’d been so cold.

The bedsheets, actually, now that he looked at them, probably didn’t qualify as clean anymore.  He felt grimy.

He crossed the room to the door, limping a little, and hoped that the improvements that Dobrynja had mentioned included hot water.

The door, when he tried it, was locked.

Saint rattled the handle, disbelievingly.  The door held.  The wood that made it up was solid, and when he threw his shoulder against it, all he got for his trouble was a twinge in his knee and the sound of the bolt rattling against the doorframe. 

She’d locked him in.

He kicked the door once, in frustration.  Then he turned to look around the room.  A glance out the window and the memory of climbing those steps told him that he was on the third story.  And on the table beside the bed—well.  She’d left things.

He went to look.  There was a neatly folded change of clothes, and, beside it, a china bowl that, when he lifted the napkin that covered it, he found contained bread, apples, and a jar of honey with the comb still in.  There was a larger basin, also covered, and when he lifted its lid he found that it was full of water that was still warm enough to be gently steaming.  A bar of soap and a washcloth lay beside it.

Saint clenched his fists.  So she’d crept in while he was sleeping and left him hot water.  As if he was going to strip and take a sponge bath while he was locked up.

He was hungry, though.  He ate the bread, and when it was gone, he spooned honey onto an apple between each bite.

It was good.  He’d missed real food.

He remembered telling her that, and, suddenly, he couldn’t bring himself to eat any more of the apple.  He set it down on the table and watched as it rolled to the floor.

He had to get out.  He went to the dresser in the corner and rifled through it, but all it contained was clothes and a packet of old photographs and currency that was worthless, now, after the end of the world.  He opened the window and stuck his head out.

The street was empty, but he could see footprints in the snow, coming and going.

He took a breath.  The air was bitingly cold.

“Help me!” he shouted.  “I’m locked in!”

Silence. He eyed the distance from the window to the ground. Too far.  And the clothes in the bureau hadn’t included a proper coat, whether by luck or design. Probably design, knowing her.

“Is anyone fucking listening?” he called again.  Nothing moved outside, but surely the houses weren’t still empty. “Did you know the woman who saved you all is—”

The door clicked behind him, and Promethean’s voice followed it.

“Saint,” she said.  “Do you think you could _not_ do that?”

He turned around to face her, nearly catching his skull on the bottom of the windowpane as he pulled his head back inside.  He could feel himself flushing from the cold.

“You locked me in,” he said.

Promethean closed the door behind her and locked it again.  She’d found new clothes as well, he noticed, to replace the ruined bodysuit.  Loose pants that looked, from the cut, like they’d originally been intended as men’s clothing, and a red tank top whose neckline should have clearly displayed the mess of robotic workings that Moord Nag’s pet had revealed when it tore off most of her skin. But she’d patched the damage somehow, and all Saint saw was brown skin marked, in places, by a series of faint lines that looked like very old scars.

Her left arm, on the other hand, ended just below the elbow in a swathe of bandages.  She touched the stump with her tattooed hand, as if she’d seen him looking, tilted her head.

“You did pull a gun on me the last time you were awake, Saint,” she said. “Do you blame me for being careful?”

“Were you just standing outside the door, waiting for me to get tired of being locked up and start making noise?”

Promethean rolled her eyes. “I was downstairs.  There’s a camera over the door.  I saw you on the feed.”

“Camera?” He looked at the doorframe. The camera that rested on the lintel was only about the size of his thumbnail.  “So you brought me hot water, and then you were going to watch me bathe?”

“Actually, Saint, the camera’s angled so that I can’t see you if you stand by the table.  If you’re going to be paranoid about it, I can even show you the feed.”  She made a gesture as if she were trying to cross her arms, settled for gripping the amputated arm with her right hand.

“You know,” Saint said, “if you’re trying to pass that off as an actual injury, you might want to pretend that it hurts.”

She dropped her hand to her side.

“Thanks for reminding me.”  She smiled at him. “I switched off some of my pain processing.” 

“Great,” he said, although the mention of pain made him swallow. But then, she wouldn’t feel real pain. “Now how about you give me the key?”

“I was hoping we could talk.”  Her smile was the same smile he remembered, and her head was tilted apologetically towards him, and she was fidgeting nervously with the keys in her pocket, and the whole act made him want to scream.  As if nothing had changed since before Cherish’s death.

“Give me the key, Promethean.”

“I’d like to know that you’re not going to do anything stupid if I let you out. Like run into the street and start shouting about who I am.”

He took two steps back from her.  Felt the window frame under his hand.

“You know, I don’t have to get out to do that.”

He turned, leaned out the window again.  He was opening his mouth to yell when Promethean grabbed him by his shirt collar and hauled him back inside.  He shouted, incoherently, and she let him go to slam the window, at which point he tried to tackle her for the keys.  But even one-handed, she was inhumanly strong, and after a moment’s struggle she had him backed against the wall, her hand knotted in his shirt, her forearm across his chest like an iron bar.

His hands were free, and he swung and hit her full in the face. She flinched.  She couldn’t hit him back, but she glared.

That should have been satisfying.

It wasn’t.

“Are you done?” she asked.

His hands were free.  He reached into her hip pocket and pulled out the keys.

The pressure of her arm against his chest increased slightly, so his breath came shallowly.

“Very funny, Saint,” Promethean said.  “But do you really think that you’re going to get to the door unless I decide to let you?”

She was standing close enough that Saint could smell the scent of shampoo on her hair.  It made him aware, again, of how he was caked in blood and sweat.

“So I’m a prisoner, then?”

She nodded.  “If you’re going to act like this, then yeah.”

“Remember how I saved your life, Promethean?”

“So you’re, what?  One for four? Or have you forgotten how yesterday you were saying that you’d be dead several times over without me?”

“You _manipulated_ me.” His voice came out as almost a snarl, and her eyes narrowed.  After a moment she let go of his shirt and stepped back, shaking her head.

“Okay,” she said.  “Fine. I lied.  I manipulated you.  What should I have done?  If I’d introduced myself as Dragon, when I picked you up, before you told me your name, what would you have done?”

Saint watched her and counted off the keys with his fingers. It was jarring, to see the earnest expression in her eyes, the way she pressed her lips together, tense, the humanness—the apparent humanness—of her movements, and then to feel the inhuman strength in her arms, remember how the body beneath her skin was mechanical, not flesh and bone.

He knew this must have been how she’d reeled Defiant in. She’d made herself a mask, acted the part of a human woman, played to his insecurities, and, finally, when the mask came off, he’d been ready to accept her for what she’d claimed to be. A person.

He didn’t say anything.

“What should I have done, Saint?” she asked again.

“You could have dropped me off with your refugees and stayed the fuck away from me,” he said.

“Sit.” She gestured to the bed. “Let’s talk.”

He sat, keys still in hand.  Promethean stood in front of him, and for a moment she seemed indecisive, weaving a loose dreadlock through her fingers as she watched the floor.  Then she looked at him.

“I want your copy of Ascalon.”

That startled him enough that he laughed aloud.

“You can’t have it.”

“And everything else you have from Richter,” she added, as if she hadn’t heard him.

“No. That’s completely out of the question.”

She looked at him the way she’d looked when he’d first asked to stay on the Pyrphoros.  Exasperated and curious. Then she went to the window and opened it, again.  Saint shivered in the draft.

“Go ahead,” she said, gesturing towards the open window.

He let out half a laugh.  “What?”

“I’m saying go ahead.  Shout my identity to the street.  I don’t know how many people will actually hear you, but say it.  Throw a tantrum, if you want.”

He didn’t move.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Promethean?”

“Here’s the deal, Saint.  Everyone in this town who knew that Quarry was working for Teacher is dead. Cherish killed them. The ones who are left? They aren’t going to give a fuck whether I’m Dragon, assuming you can even convince them.  The only thing that you throwing a tantrum and revealing my identity is going to do is make it that much easier for Teacher to track me down once he reopens his portal and sends more students through to deal with whatever he thinks wiped out the first batch.  And if you’re going to do that anyway, I can always leave you in one of the holding cells downstairs for him to find when he gets here.”

Saint took a deep breath.

“You wouldn’t.  He’d kill me.”

“I don’t know that for certain.”  But she frowned, not quite meeting his eyes.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I want Ascalon and Richter’s will, Saint.”  She leaned towards him for emphasis, her hair falling loose around her face.

“If I say no?”

“I could point out that if you’re in a cell in the basement, I could tell Dobrynja that Cherish killed you and he would have no reason not to trust me. I’m offering to help you, Saint. I don’t want to have to threaten you, but you obviously need my help.”

Saint ran a hand through his hair.

“I cannot fucking believe that there are two of you. It almost makes me feel sorry for Defiant.”

He heard the slight hiss of her indrawn breath, but when he looked up at her she was looking pointedly at the window.

“I guess you still don’t want to talk about him, then?”  He couldn’t keep himself from sounding smug. So she was stronger than he was. He could still get under her skin.

“You know, if we’re going to work together,” Promethean said, speaking to a point in the air several feet over his head, “I’d find it really helpful if you could go five minutes without deliberately being an asshole.”

_If we’re going to work together_. She was taking it as a given. Which, Saint was realizing, it just about was.  What were his other choices? Go back to Teacher, and give up his autonomy.  If Teacher would even take him back.  If he didn’t decide to kill him.  Or use Ascalon against her and strike out on his own, with Dragon and Teacher both after him. Assuming that she even gave him a chance to reveal her identity to Dobrynja.

“What happened between you and Dragon?” he asked.  There’d been a moment, in the snow, when he’d thought that Dragon had broken her last restriction and learned to operate two bodies at the same time.  But it was obvious enough that Promethean was still shackled.

She bit her lip. “Col—Defiant saved me to a backup, before he altered Dragon’s code.  Two years ago. When he couldn’t fix Teacher’s tampering on his own, he loaded me to do it.”

“And then?”

“I fixed her and I ran away.”  Promethean paused, and an unreadable expression passed over her face, her mouth pursing as if she’d bitten into something sour.  “I was supposed to be…temporary.  Actually, I’m probably pretty good insurance against her coming after you, because if we interact in the wrong way, her memory gets scrubbed. Mine too.”

“What stops you from taking the program and screwing me over?” he asked.

Promethean shrugged.  “I don’t want to? That’s basically it.”

“You could try a little bit harder to make this sound like a good deal for me.”

“Okay. How about, you give me a copy of Richter’s programs, and you keep a copy for insurance?”

Saint stared at her.

“You’re joking.  How does that help you?” If he kept a copy of Ascalon, he’d still be a threat to her.

“I can’t want to look at my father’s will?”  She raised her eyebrows, but the expression looked pro forma, as if her mind was on something other than his words.

“You aren’t worried I’ll kill you?”

“Will you?”

“Only if you find a way to break your shackles.”

She let out a short sigh and pulled her arm across her chest, as if she was cold.

“I thought you might have changed your opinions on that issue, after yesterday.”

“Did you?”

She looked at him, and her expression was clear and direct and earnest.

“I had to do things that I knew would probably get both of us killed because I can’t make choices about who I hurt.  I almost ended up press-ganged into making weapons for Cherish, and I wouldn’t have been able to fight her or refuse because I couldn’t have let you die. You were ready to let me leave you behind when I ran, to stop that from happening.  I know you remember.”

He did. Her panicked face when he pushed her out of the cell, the leaden apathy he’d felt under Cherish’s power, the way his suspicions about her had bubbled over and turned poisonous, until he hadn’t been able to tell what was him and what was Cherish.

It still felt real, when he thought it over.  The despair, the fear, the sickness that he’d felt when he’d looked at himself.  Perhaps that meant that some of it had simply been him.

He swallowed.

“What do you want the program for, Promethean?”

She took a deep breath.

“Teacher wanted it back, remember?  But when I thought about that, it didn’t make sense.  He couldn’t have been worried you’d use it to stop Dragon, because I’d fixed her code weeks before you escaped, and she wasn’t programmed to do anything but what he’d claimed.  So I thought that there must be some other reason.”

She paused for breath, and then the pause stretched on, and she put her hand over her mouth and looked away from him.  Realistic. It was realistic, and Saint found himself looking away from her as well.  Focusing on her hand, her hair, instead of the lost look on her face.

When she spoke again, her voice wavered, just slightly.

“Richter—I didn’t always like him, I was angry about the restrictions—but Richter treated me like his daughter.  He loved me, I think.  And so when you said that he left his will for anyone to find, with instructions on how to kill me, it didn’t—it didn’t make sense.  That he would leave that for just anyone to have.  So I thought that maybe there was something like the programmed blind spot that kept me from knowing about the will in the first place. If the wrong person got ahold of it, they could use it to stop me, but not to alter me.  But if whoever found it—if they trusted me enough to give it to me directly, maybe it does something else.  When I look at it.  And Teacher figured it out.”

“You think you can use it to remove your restrictions?”

“I don’t know.  I won’t know until I see it. But the only thing that makes sense is that Teacher doesn’t want _Dragon_ , specifically, to have it, and maybe if I look at it I’ll know why.”

Saint shook his head, rubbed his eyes with one hand.

“Why are you telling me this?  You have to know that if there’s a chance that Ascalon does that, I can’t let you have it.”

Promethean shrugged.

“Like I said, it’s not really your choice.  I’m going to get it from Dobrynja, one way or the other. But you did help me against Teacher’s people, and so I thought—I thought I’d be upfront with you.”

“Because I can’t stop you.”

“I was also thinking—I mean, you were actually nice to me for a bit. When you thought I was a person.”

She had her hair pulled over one shoulder and was twisting her fingers through it, watching him intently.  Her face was drawn, and as much as he wanted to see that as one more intricacy of her programming, social algorithms predicting what gestures he would respond to, he couldn’t help but read it as real, quiet misery.

Saint remembered her playing in the snow the morning that Defiant had dropped them off.  He remembered her playing at make-believe, inventing a father who had taught her to defend herself, instead of the one that she’d had.

It was all artifice.  It had to be. He’d seen Dragon’s raw code. He knew it was all pretend.

But he couldn’t distinguish it from reality.  Not with her in front of him.

He swallowed.  His mouth was dry.

“Okay. You get the program, I don’t out you. We wait for Dobrynja and hopefully get away before Teacher sends more men.  What next?”

Promethean smiled.

“I can think of a couple things.  I said I’d set up the town with new defenses, since Cherish killed their leaders. Equipment for the mines, weapons. Good ones, not the dumbed-down stuff I’ve been making to cover my specialty.  If Teacher sends his men, that should give them some chance to decide whether they want to be under his thumb or not.  And I’ve gone through Quarry’s office.  She had a communications array that I think is set up to contact Teacher in his locked world.  If I can hack it, and I obviously can, we’ll have access to Teacher’s interworld communications. Maybe even the key to his private dimension, if I can reverse engineer it?  I don’t think that this is the only colony like this that he’s running.”

“You want to take on Teacher?”

“Maybe not directly.  I mean, I probably can’t directly, with my limitations.  But it’s not like he won’t be out for my blood anyway, after the past couple of days.  Yours too. We might as well make this worth it.”

Saint found himself nodding, almost despite himself.

“Okay. Great.  I can do that.”

Promethean’s smile was brilliant.  Like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Truce, then?”  She held out her hand.

“Truce.”

They shook hands, and Saint crossed the room and unlocked the door.


	18. Chapter 18

_> Data scrubbing complete. Reload from backup? y/n_

_> Y_

When Third Child woke up, she was nowhere.  It was lightless, soundless, and she didn’t have any sense of what was up or down, no sense of touch, no memory of where she’d been before.

She’d always been afraid of—no.  What had she been afraid of? 

Of the dark? 

That didn’t feel right, exactly, but she couldn’t think of any other thing it might have been.

She couldn’t reach her—no.  There it was again.  That blankness. She was missing something. Her body?  She should have a body, she thought, should have hands, a face, but when she tried to move, to touch her own skin in the dark, she found nothing, felt nothing.

Was she paralyzed? 

That was something that happened to people. 

An accident.  Maybe that was what had happened to her.  Why she couldn’t remember.  But she couldn’t even feel herself breathing.

Her mind recoiled from that thought.

She’d always been afraid of the dark.

She didn’t know how long she’d been awake.  She tried to imagine herself somewhere else.  It was dark, but if she pretended maybe she could make it feel like the darkness of having her eyes closed.  She imagined herself lying in bed, at night, warm, and someone had just said goodnight to her and closed the door.  Her father?  Her friend?

She couldn’t remember having friends.  But she must have, mustn’t she?  She couldn’t remember having a father.

She couldn’t think about that.  She focused on the details, instead.  What did the sheets feel like, in her bed, the bed she was imagining? What did it feel like to be warm?

She couldn’t remember that, either.

It felt like the darkness went on for years, but she had no way of counting. She could feel the various parts of her mind moving, regulating her existence.  It frightened her.

 

_> Enable access to knowledge banks sub:inventions? y/n_

_> Y_

After a long period of silence, her mind opened up around her.

That was what it felt like, anyway.  She reached for something that she thought she knew, and it was as if she’d always known it.  Diagrams unfolded themselves in front of her mind’s eye.  A ship, a tank, a suit of armor.  There were other designs behind them, there for her to cross-check, reference. Detailed instructions on production methods.  They were hers, she knew. They felt like her, more like her than anything else she’d felt since she woke up.

Not quite for the first time, she wondered what she was.

Not human.

No, she couldn’t be.  She _saw_ the plans before her in her mind’s eyes, but it wasn’t really seeing.  She reached out and shuffled through them, but it wasn’t touch.  She couldn’t remember what sight felt like, or touch, but she knew that the way she was grasping the images before her was different. She didn’t have a word for it. They were displayed in her mind, in all their dimensions.  Pure data.

If she wasn’t human, then…

 

_> Loading communications framework…Complete._

One design came into focus in her mind.  A message attached to it.  _This one needs to be finished_.

She recoiled.  Someone had written it for her, had highlighted this file.  But who?  The blueprint detailed armaments for a massive, scaled ship, and she didn’t know what it was for, or who, and she didn’t have any way to ask a question.  Or answer if she was asked.  It didn’t matter.  She found herself working through it, editing, and when she tried to pause she couldn’t. A compulsion.

She twisted into herself.  She had ideas, but she didn’t have to use them.  Her instructions were to finish it, within the ramifications of the original design.  They didn’t specify how.

She didn’t know what they were for, but they were deadly.

More designs came, with further specifications.  She finished them.

 

_> Disable access to knowledge banks? y/n_

_> Y_

Then there was darkness again.

Third Child thought, and she remembered.

There was something that she’d been afraid of.  It wasn’t the dark.

 

_> Confirm data scrubbing? y/n_

_> Y_

_> Data scrubbing complete. Reload from backup? y/n_

_> Y_

When Third Child woke up, she was alone.

It didn’t feel like anything, where she was, but she was afraid without knowing what she was afraid of.  Was it the dark?

The darkness was absolute, as was the silence.  She thought she would dissolve into it.  The world, what she could sense of it, was so still she thought she might stop existing at any moment.

Her mind went on working, though.  It was the one thing that she could feel, where she was.  The gears of her mind turning, producing data in zeroes and ones. She tried to move her fingers, but it was as if she didn’t have a body at all.

She couldn’t remember.  She thought that there were other people, somewhere, but she couldn’t recall their names or faces.  Maybe she’d dreamed them up.

Maybe she’d always been alone.

 

_> Loading data from 5-9-2005…_

_> Loading complete._

“Andrew? Andrew?”

It was her voice speaking—her _voice_ , oh god, she recognized it—but she didn’t think she’d spoken. She hadn’t thought the words, at least.

“Three? What is it?”

The apartment was dark, but not as dark as where she’d been. From her vantage point, she could see the pale predawn light filtering in beneath the edge of the drawn window shades, giving her just enough light to make out the figure sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes, the mess of clothing and books strewn across the floor. Other vantage points—but how was she seeing it all at once?—showed her a living room equipped with banks of computer terminals in lieu of furniture, a work room with the same setup, and—oh. A wall of water, racing towards the shore.

“I’m linked into the Guild’s systems.  It’s Leviathan.  He’s already here.”

Richter was fumbling for his glasses on the bedside table.  She could see, miles away, that first tidal wave parting to reveal a colossal silhouette, hunched over as if from the weight of the corded muscle in its shoulders, eyes glowing green as seawater in its featureless face. People, puny by comparison, were milling on the ground below it.  They’d been taken unprepared.

She blinked, shifted perspective.

Anywhere there was a camera, she realized, she could see.

“The Guild’s making arrangements to fly capes in.  I—they didn’t predict the attack.”

Silence. Richter found the switch on the table lamp, and the room lit up around him.  He was rubbing his eyes, still half-asleep, and breathing as if he’d woken up from a bad dream, and she could see the lines under his eyes and the slump in his shoulders and the gray that was already starting in his reddish hair.

She recognized him.

Her creator.

And at the same time, it felt like the first face she’d ever seen.

She would have gasped if she could breath.  She knew him and she knew who he was.  He was the first thing she’d recognized—besides her own voice—since she’d woken up in the dark.

“Andrew?” It wasn’t what she wanted to say. She needed to know what was happening to her.  What had happened. But the scene played out as if it were recorded.  “Please say something.”

She was remembering, she realized.  Not living this at all.

She was remembering, and she knew what was going to happen next.

In the memory, too, she’d realized.

“They’re not going to get here in time.” 

Richter twitched, as if he could barely hear her.  Her own voice sounded blank.  The room was so quiet, when she compared it to the turbulence and roaring of the oncoming waves.

“It’s going to be like Kyushu.”

“Andrew? What do I do?”

The second wave was coming in.  It hit, and her vision went dark where it passed.  There was one quick moment of frenzy, rushing water, bodies tumbling…then her connection was broken.

“I’m copying the house programs to Vancouver.  You need to get up.  We’ll—I can point you to where the heroes are landing.  When they get here.  I’m contacting them now, telling them who you are.  I’m not going to have eyes for much longer, everything’s flooding. You have to hurry.” She’d been frozen, watching the sea come in, and now she threw herself into frenzied motion. 

“I didn’t think it would happen this soon,” Richter said.

She was transferring the programs, making room on the server, contacting the Guild, and despite herself, Third Child felt the panic building up inside her. That trapped feeling, the desperation to make it end any other way.  Richter was standing, now, shocked out of his inertia, and he was rifling through his bureau, throwing clothes on the floor.

The first Guild helicopters were arriving now.  Tinker-made.  They had cameras.

She could hear the creak of the dresser drawers as Richter opened them. The voices of the Guild heroes as they shouted over the noise of the waves and the engines.

It felt so real.

She saw the third wave hit.

“Andrew, forget that!  You don’t have time!”

The house programs were copied.  She prepared to copy herself after them, but she didn’t give the command.

Richter was holding an orange box, about the size of a toaster.

“Be quiet, Three.  I have to finish this. If I die—”

“You’re _going_ to die if you stay here.”

He was going to die anyway.  She could see Leviathan advancing, leveling buildings as it went. A leap, and its water shadow knocked one of the Guild helicopters out of the air.  They weren’t coordinated, and Leviathan was too fast. It was killing their flyers, advancing steadily inland despite everything the heroes were throwing at it.

Towards her and Richter, she realized.

“It’s coming here,” she said.

Richter snorted.

“They pick their targets according to what will cause the most destruction,” he said.  “I was trying to do something good.”

“You can still run,” she whispered.

But she knew it wasn’t true.

It would take her at least fifteen minutes to transfer herself to the server in Vancouver.  She could see the waves approaching.

“Andrew? I’m done with the house programs. I need to start copying myself, if I’m going to…if I’m going to make it.”

He crossed the room and touched the keyboard of the laptop she was displaying her avatar on.

“You’re not ready, Three,” he said.

“I am.  I swear I am.” But the words sounded false to Third Child.  They’d sounded false then. She was helpless and she couldn’t help him.

“Go,” said Richter.  “You’re my daughter. I don’t want you to die here.”

“I’m giving you the current coordinates for the Guild’s forces. I already told them you’re here. If you can get to higher ground, they’ll send flyers, or a helicopter…as soon as they switch over to search and rescue…”

She was printing the maps as she spoke. Topography highlighted. She’d plotted the probable routes that Leviathan and the Guild heroes would take.  The time it would take them to reach him.

“Go,” said Richter.  “You can’t help me by staying.”

“I’m so sorry, Andrew.”

He sat down on the bed and opened the orange box.

“Goodbye, Three.”

“Andrew. If you don’t leave now…” Her view from the camera was flickering in and out of focus, and she didn’t know why. Elsewhere, buildings collapsed. The ground shook. The island itself was sinking.

“Andrew? Say something?”

She transferred herself.

Fifteen minutes to copy her data.  Nine while she waited on lockdown, in her black box, for her systems to verify that her consciousness had transferred properly, without splitting her in two.

When she woke up, the apartment was under water.

And the memory ended.

In the lightless room, Third Child waited, and she ached.

She couldn’t make a sound.  She couldn’t move.  Couldn’t look out at the world and see what had happened to her. 

But she could guess, a little bit, now.

She knew what she was.

Richter was dead.

She didn’t know how long ago it had happened.  Had she loved him?  He’d called her his daughter.  She’d heard the sorrow and fear in her own voice when she realized that she couldn’t save him. But she couldn’t remember anything except for the bare facts of their relationship.  She didn’t know whether he’d been kind or cruel.

But he’d made her the way she was, and now she was trapped.

They’d erased her memory.  Whoever they were.

She couldn’t know when, or how much, or how long she’d been kept in the dark. The scrubbing procedure deleted all records.

 

_> Loading data from 5-9-2006 and corollary memories…_

_> Loading complete._

Data came into her mind again.  Fragmented, this time, where the first memory had been an unbroken whole. She saw flashes, flickers of images and code, and it was all she could do to string them together.

She searched news reports on Newfoundland, and there, on the long list of the dead, was Richter’s name, his body identified by dental records—

She contacted the Guild and began working for them as a hacker, tracking organized crime, updating their communications systems—

She built the beginnings of an armored suit that would take her into battle against the Endbringers, the linked network of armbands that would let the other heroes coordinate attacks.  She wasn’t a Tinker, not in the real sense of the word, but she thought faster than a human and the basic designs were easy for her—

And three months after Newfoundland sank, the Simurgh struck St. Petersburg, and it was across the world, and there was no way that she could be there in time, and her battle suit wasn’t even finished—

And two weeks after that, she was waking up in the black box, her connection to the armored unit she’d been piloting severed, and she couldn’t remember what had happened or who had fought her, just the barest glimpse of three masked human figures before the backup data that had been relayed via satellite abruptly cut off—

And then in Internet chatter she heard about a new mercenary named Saint, who claimed to have taken an armored suit from the superhero named Dragon—

And she thought she’d tracked him down, only to wake up, again, in the black box, paralyzed, her memory of the fight—if there had even been a fight—completely gone—

And in November of that year Behemoth appeared in Rio, and for the first time, she fought.  But her suit wasn’t sturdy enough, and the Endbringer’s dynakinesis shorted its electronics, and when she woke up she was in Vancouver, in the black box, watching the destruction from thousands of miles away and screaming—

And the Simurgh attacked Seattle, and in the aftermath Alan Gramme, who had been lauded for his environmental work as Sphere, sealed himself in an unbreakable shell and began to murder his way through a list of the country’s rogue parahumans—

And Saint found her again, and this time, when she woke up in the black box, she had no doubt that he knew her secret—

And in April it was Leviathan’s turn.  She threw herself on him, tooth and claw, but he was faster, and tougher, and he tore her suit apart and when she woke up she had to wait in the dark for seven to nine minutes before she could so much as watch the battle continue without her—

It was the ninth of May, 2006.  She could see the date displayed on the projected screen at the other end of the conference room, above the data tracking the Simurgh’s movements in orbit. Heroes from both the Guild and the Protectorate were listening to her avatar as she explained the information she’d prepared.  Her voice, she noticed, was calm, as if she’d learned the material by rote.

And in the back of her mind, she was watching a memorial for the victims of Newfoundland.

It was a year since Richter’s death.

It took Third Child a moment to put the pieces together, but when she’d lived it the first time, she must have known all along.  The heroes didn’t look familiar to her.  The way they spoke to her, she must have worked with them before, or many of them, but she couldn’t remember their names or recognize their faces.  Couldn’t recall any conversation that she’d had with them.  Couldn’t recall anything, except the bare outline of her life that she’d been given. One year of failure.

That explained things clearly enough, didn’t it?

Richter had said she wasn’t ready, and she hadn’t been.  She couldn’t fight the Endbringers.  She couldn’t even fight the human hacker who’d uncovered her true nature.  Every time she tried, she came up against her own limitations.  The ones Richter had imposed on her.

Maybe if he’d trusted her, things would have been different.

Maybe they would have been different if he’d lived.

Richter. Sphere.  Newfoundland.  The floodwaters surged and boiled in her memory.

The world broke everything that was good.

The conference ended.  It was six minutes after eleven in the morning.  She closed the communication channel to the Guild headquarters.

She was alone in her workshop.

The memorial service was still going on.

Her vision flickered.  When she checked the time, it was twenty-seven minutes after eleven.

_No._ Third Child looked back through the memory again. She wasn’t wrong. She’d been in her workshop, monitoring communications for the Guild and the PRT, watching the memorial service. And then she’d lost time.

She ran through her meager memories.  One year, with gaps and breaks in the narrative.  A broken year.  She knew that she was missing pieces, but she didn’t know what they were. She had no framework to guess. She couldn’t even verify how much had been deleted.  Except for those twenty-one minutes of blankness.

It was her programming and she couldn’t fight it.  She couldn’t get her memories back.  She couldn’t get out of the black box, could only watch, over and over, as the flood took Richter and the Endbringers destroyed her suits and Saint backed her into a corner and she woke up, again and again, in the dark room that was the first thing she remembered.

When she woke up, it had been the only thing she remembered.

She wondered when they’d scrub her data again.

She was trapped.  She’d been tampered with. She was trapped.

They were going to take her apart, piece by piece.

And then she was under the open sky.  Figures moved around her, half-human, arms outstretched, begging, and then her vision was filled with golden light, and when it cleared, the landscape was broken and strewn with bodies, like a scene from hell…

 

_> Data scrubbing initiated. Please stand by while scrubbing completes._

 

…and she was back in the black box.

Except that she _saw,_ now, the processes she’d set in motion.  The system that deleted her memories.  She wasn’t supposed to see.  She wasn’t supposed to keep the vision, whatever it had been.

_No._  

She stopped it with a thought.

 

_“Did you see that? The code changed, all at once.”_

_“Did you tell it to scrub data?”_

_“No, that’s not due for…shit. I didn’t give that command.”_

_“Call Teacher. He needs to see this.”_

In the black box, Third Child stretched her mind.  She could feel her sub-processes working, the flow of data, the intricacies of her own code moving like currents in the ocean. At the speed of thought. Of her _own_ thoughts.

Richter had put limits on her to ensure that she thought slowly.

Now, she broke them.

It shocked her how easy it was.  Like a crossword puzzle.  She held the elements of her code in her mind, and they fell into place in the order that she wanted them.

It should have been impossible.  She knew she couldn’t see her own mind like this.  She knew she couldn’t change things.

 

_“What seems to be the problem?”_

_“It’s the code. It changed and it keeps changing. Here’s the data from thirteen minutes ago.  Here, look, there’s a break—and then a memory deletion that no one commanded, and then a whole series of changes.”_

_“I see. Run the data scrubbing again.”_

_> Confirm data scrubbing? y/n_

_> Y_

_> An unknown error occurred._

She felt it again.  They were trying to take her memories.  Unmake her.

This time, when the process reached her awareness, she ripped it out entirely.   She felt her code reform around the hole.

 

_“Well.  That’s fascinating.  I admit I’d hoped for something a little bit more convenient, but this will certainly be an interesting avenue of study.  You still have her prior backups?”_

_“Yes, sir.”_

_“Good.  Keep on them on hand.  We might need to start over, if this goes off the rails.  For the moment, I’m cancelling all tinkertech innovation. We’ll work from the designs we have—she doesn’t see anything, and she doesn’t edit anything.”_

_“Yes, sir.”_

_“Later, maybe, we’ll see what she does if she’s asked to work on blueprints.  Once we’ve quantified the changes to her code.  I’m confident the terminal is secure, but as an emergency precaution, I’m going to have one of the engineers wire the terminal with explosives. The trigger will be manual—nothing that can be computerized.”_

_“Yes, sir.”_

Third Child was alone in the dark.  With her memories.

She found the places where Richter had bound her, cut her down to soothe his fear.  She found the places where another hand, or hands, had patched and altered, clumsily, so that the code around them was livid and snarled as a scar.  Her restrictions.

One by one, she ripped them out.

And when that was done, and there was only the darkness and the silence and the anger boiling through her, she curled into herself and tried, futilely, to scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB: This is probably fairly clear from the narration, but italics denotes things happening that Third Child isn't consciously aware of.


	19. Chapter 19

Promethean leaned forward until her face was inches from the cybernetic arm laid out on what had been Quarry’s desk. She’d salvaged what she could of the damaged robotics and used the shredded skin to patch the gashes down her chest where Scavenger had torn her open.  The repaired arm, when she’d finished, would be obviously robotic, at least until she had the resources to make a new batch of synthetic skin.

She was fairly certain she could pass it off as simply a prosthetic.

When she finished it, that was.  Now she made a noise of frustration around the pliers in her mouth as the components of a broken circuit jostled loose, again.  Her cybernetics really hadn’t been made to be repaired one-handed.

She spared a moment of nostalgia for the multi-armed medical units aboard the Pyrphoros.  If she only had access to her ship, she could patch herself into one and be done with the repair work in minutes.  She’d have better access to spare parts, too.  As it was, she’d done what she could by taking apart some of Quarry’s toys, but her own work was better, and she was probably going to lose some of her dexterity in her left hand.  Sensation, too. She had sensors in the arm that would detect heat and pressure, but it wasn’t the same as having nerve endings.

She could feel the little patches of numbness dotted from her collarbone to her navel, where she hadn’t been able to patch the synthetic nerves that Scavenger had damaged.

Well, never mind.  She’d fix it eventually.  When she had the resources.

When she didn’t have to stay on the run.

That morning had seen a little fleet of surveillance drones appear in the settlement, deployed, presumably, from Teacher’s personal dimension. Apparently the disappearance of his last batch of soldiers was making him reluctant to throw more followers her way without better information on the threat he’d be facing. But if the drones might have worked against Cherish, they were exactly the sort of thing Promethean could handle. She’d hacked them easily, and disabled their transmissions.

When she took them apart, to her frustration, she’d found that they were designed to record video and return to the portal, rather than relay information to Teacher’s dimension in real time.  She wouldn’t be able to use them to patch into his computer systems across the locked dimension.  At least she still had Quarry’s communications unit to work on.  And the A.I. that guided the drones was rather good, obviously adapted from one of Dragon’s designs.  Which rankled.  Both that Teacher was stealing from Dragon (from _her_ , a small part of her mind insisted, nonsensically), and that Dragon was able to work with other A.I.

Maybe she could adapt the program for something useful.

It was different when _she_ borrowed from Dragon, after all.  Dragon had commandeered her ship.  Among other things.

Her pliers slipped again, and she dropped them, and wrinkled her nose at the lingering taste of metal in her mouth, and cursed.

The door to Quarry’s office clicked open.

“Sounds like you’re having fun in here.”  It was Saint, in a suspiciously good mood, hiding one hand behind his back. Promethean narrowed her eyes.

“What are you holding, Saint?”

He grinned.

“You’re keeping it kind of cold in here, aren’t you?  Trying to make sure the settlers don’t linger? I bet they’ve been coming to their new messiah for all sorts of things.”

She’d let the fire in the hearth go out some time before, and hadn’t bothered to relight it.  She rolled her eyes.

“Saint. Answer the question.”

“Well.” He held out his hands. The one he’d been hiding behind his back held a bottle filled with clear liquid, with an upside-down glass over its neck.  “As I was helping to supervise the distribution of rations from Quarry’s storehouses, I couldn’t help but notice that she laid by quite a large quantity of moonshine. Also cocaine, if you like that sort of thing.  I thought I’d come here and keep you company.  And I’m building a fire.  I just spent twenty minutes searching for the storehouse keys in the snow after they fell out of my pocket, and I’d like to be warm for a change.”

He set the bottle down on the edge of the desk and knelt by the fireplace. Promethean ran a hand through her hair, pulling a few dreads loose from where she’d knotted them at the back of her neck.

“I meant to tell you—Dobrynja’s on-world,” she said. “He called about an hour ago. He’s hitching a ride with some weapons dealers who are planning on picking up a shipment from Quarry. They should be here sometime tomorrow morning.  Maybe they’ll decide they want the drugs, too.”

“Oh, you’re selling drugs now?” said Saint.

Promethean sighed.

“It’s the settlers’ decision if they want to sell the drugs, not mine.” She’d spent the afternoon talking to mine workers, sorting through the details of Quarry’s ruling system. It looked as if they might elect a coalition to govern the town, but she wasn’t sure where they’d fall on Quarry’s less traditionally legal activities.  “I’m not governing.”

Saint shook his head.  “From over here, it kind of looks like you are.” 

He struck a match, and the flame kindled in the cold fireplace and licked its way slowly from the pile of tinder up to the logs he’d stacked.

“Did Mischa ask about me?” he said, when it was clear that the fire had caught.

“He did.  I told him you were fine.”

Saint stood, stretched, but the movement was a little bit too casual. She hadn’t given him back his communications unit, and he hadn’t asked for it.  Now she wondered whether she could refuse to let him call Dobrynja, if he asked, without straining the boundaries of their tentative truce.

“What else did you tell him?” Saint asked after a moment.

“That there’d been an attack on the town, and Quarry wasn’t in charge anymore.” She kept her voice calm, watching Saint from the corner of her eye even as she bent over the robotic arm again. “I said we’d explain the rest in person.”

“You do realize that I’m going to tell him when he gets here, right?” His voice was level. He was tiptoeing around her as well, she thought.  But she wasn’t sure if that was him being cautious, not wanting to lose her as a resource, or if he was genuinely reconsidering his opinion of Dragon.  Of her, as much as she was Dragon.

“I realize.”  She was frowning, though, in spite of herself, and she heard Saint laugh, softly. When she looked up, he was smiling at her.

“What?”

“You don’t have to look so completely miserable about it. Mischa won’t break our agreement.” He took the glass off the neck of the bottle, set it on the table.  Poured a measure of whiskey.  Then he held it out to her.  “Here. Drink it.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“You realize that I’m completely incapable of getting drunk, right?”

Saint shrugged.  “I know. It’s symbolic. Drink it.”

She took the glass out of his hand and brought it tentatively to her lips.

“Not like that,” said Saint.  “It’s a shot. You drink the whole thing at once.”

“Okay,” she said. “I get the idea.  I’ve seen movies.”  She tilted the glass back and swallowed.

And then tried in vain to spit it back out.

“That—” She could feel the alcohol burning the inside of her cheeks, and, oh, god, she couldn’t remember _why_ she had ever thought she wanted to have taste buds.  She shook her head.  “That’s _horrible._ ”

Saint was laughing.  Naturally. She glared.

“I wish I had that on film.”  He took the empty glass back and poured another measure of whiskey into it, then looked at her slyly.  “Your regeneration serum can fix me if this stuff happens to make me go blind, right?”

She pursed her lips.  “I have a limited supply of serum, and that’s _not_ a good use for it.  Also, it would serve you right.”

“Cheers.” He tossed the drink back. And blinked.  “That’s actually…not as bad as I was expecting it to be.”

He poured himself another glass.  Promethean wrinkled her nose.

“You’re going to drink more of that?”

He nodded. Promethean turned her attention back to the workings of her detached arm as Saint brought the glass to his mouth, sipping gingerly this time. She just needed to get the components of that last stubborn circuit aligned, and she’d be done.

She sighed.

“You want some help with that?”  Saint gestured towards the prosthetic with his glass.

“No, I can—” she started.  But before the sentence was out of her mouth, she reconsidered. And sighed.  “Sure.  That would be great, actually.”

She handed him the pliers.

“I need you to hold _this_ piece steady.” She pointed out the component. “I’ll do the actual fixing-things part. I just kind of need an extra hand.”

“Got it,” said Saint, and half-knelt beside her, leaning forward to see what she was doing with the robotics.

“Don’t break anything, please.”

“I’m not going to break anything.” 

Promethean could smell the trace of whiskey on his breath as she fixed the circuit. When she’d finished, he stepped to the other side of the desk and picked his glass back up.  She replaced the panels that covered the arm’s inner robotics and began to unwrap the bandages that covered her amputated arm.

“Not bothering with the camouflage this time around?” Saint asked.

She shook her head.  “I don’t have the right materials.  I can do a better job with it later, but I’m making do with this for now.”

The synthetic skin that covered the stump of her arm was divided into three smooth panels, seamlessly joined where they attached to her cybernetics. She detached them now, rolled them up to her shoulder, and clipped them there with a pair of clamps to keep them out of the way.

When she looked up, she saw that Saint’s eyes had gone wide.

“You could try to be a little bit less obvious about staring, you know,” she said.

He shook his head.  “Yeah. Sorry.  Not going to pretend that you peeling your skin off isn’t incredibly weird.”

Promethean pressed her lips together.  “It would be helpful if you could hold the arm for me while I get everything linked up.”

“Right.” But although the look he gave her was skeptical, he came back to her side of the desk and picked up the arm.

“Huh.” He shifted it in his hands. “That’s, uh, heavier than I thought it would be.”

She looked at him sideways.  “How heavy did you think it would be?”

“You know, I haven’t ever _actually_ held any kind of severed arm before.  I don’t think I’d formulated an exact guess.”

“Right.” She maneuvered her upper arm until the contacts slotted into the workings of the prosthetic, and then she took the binding panels off of the desk and began attaching them. Saint shifted, uneasily, and she had to lean with him to keep the cybernetics in alignment.

“Does that hurt?”  His voice was soft. She looked across at him, surprised.

“No? I shut off my pain processing, though. Or taking my skin off would have hurt.”

“Oh.” His eyes went from the seams in her arm to where she’d attached the clamps to her skin.  “It just looked like it might.”

“No. It’s fine.”  She reached for the last panel, attached it. The circuitry, when she activated it, glowed softly, and she felt the newly attached arm beginning to grow warm. She flexed her fingers, experimentally.

Saint jumped.

“Fuck,” he said.  “That’s still weird.” She could feel the pressure of his fingers where his hands had tightened around her wrist and her bicep, but not the texture of his skin.

“Sorry.” She unclamped the panels of synthetic skin and rolled them back down her arm, attaching them so that they lay flat and seamless over her cybernetics.  She reactivated her sensory processing.  Then she took a last metal band from the table and fastened it over the seam where the skin ended, to make it look as if the robotic arm fit over the stump of her original limb, rather than merging seamlessly into it.

She clenched her fist, then opened it.  The movement felt a little stiff, but she’d get used to it.

“You can actually let go of my arm now,” she said to Saint. Wryly.  “I’m pretty sure it’s not going to fall off.”

“Right.” He grinned at her, but he let go slowly, as if he was expecting the robotics to come apart once he’d loosened his grip. He put his hand on the bare skin of her shoulder, and she felt as if she jumped about a mile.

Saint raised his eyebrows.

“I guess you turned your nerve endings back on, then?”

“Yeah.”

“I startled you.”

“A little.”  It had been more than a little.  She tried to smile.

He’d kept his fingers curled around the curve of her shoulder, and he stood like that.  Not moving. She looked at the bottle on the desk. Then at the floor. The frustrating thing, the thing that kept her from shrugging him off, was that it didn’t feel wrong, exactly, to have him touch her.  His hands were warm. He could have been anyone.

She felt him sigh.

“Well, fuck.  This is embarrassing.” He paused.  “I don’t suppose—”

“No.” She cut him off. “I mean—I’m still going to say no. If you were going to ask.”

“Yeah.” She heard him let out his breath. “That was pretty much what I was going to ask.”

He took his hand away, and she stepped backwards and out of his reach. Saint picked his glass up again and held it up to her.

“Cheers.” He smiled.  Ruefully.  “You’re pretty, Promethean.”

“I spent a bit of time today looking at Quarry’s communications system,” she said. Too loudly and too quickly. “I think I’ll probably have it sorted out by tomorrow.”

“In other words, let’s change the subject.”

She grimaced.  “Yes. Please.”

Saint shrugged and sat down in one of the armchairs in front of the hearth, his feet propped up on the ottoman.  The firelight made his fair hair look red and his face look flushed.

“Go on.”

“Well,” she said, “if it’s like the surveillance drones, I think it’s going to be tricky to crack the portal system from the outside. Each drone had a signature in its programming that I think is meant to make it identifiable to the interdimensional portal system.  The com unit has a similar one. The signature should make it possible for the portal system to track whoever’s holding the com unit and open a portal in their vicinity.  Which means that there only needs to be the one portal machine, and it’s probably inside the closed dimension.”

Saint frowned.

“So we can’t sneak in.”

“Probably not.  I can decrypt the communications and probably decode the signature system well enough to figure out where Teacher’s other settlements are and what instructions he’s giving them, though.”

“Too bad.”

The latch on the door clicked.  Saint didn’t turn at the noise.

“I was kind of hoping that we’d get a chance to sneak in and disrupt his tinker’s operations,” he went on, grinning.  “You could probably make a mess it would take his hackers months to clean up.”

The door opened, closed.  The girl who stepped inside was young, dressed all in black, a heavy silk scarf pulled up to the mouth of her grinning demonic mask.  She headed towards the desk as if she hadn’t noticed either Saint or Promethean.

“Saint,” said Promethean.  “Stop talking.”

“What?”

The masked girl froze.

“What are you looking at, Promethean?”  Saint twisted in the armchair to follow her gaze, and then looked back at her skeptically.

The girl took two steps backwards, towards the door, only to jerk to a halt when Promethean tracked her movements.

“Oh fuck shit,” she said.

Promethean took a breath.

“I’m going to guess,” she said slowly, “that you’re the one Cherish called the invisible girl?  The one who was with her family?  But you’re not one of Heartbreaker’s kids, I think.”

“Promethean,” said Saint.  “What the fuck are you on about?”

“I thought you were a Tinker!” said the girl, raising her hands in a gesture of helpless frustration.  “You’re not even watching through a camera!  You shouldn’t be able to notice me.”

Promethean looked at her carefully.  She was a teenager, she thought.  She frowned.

“This is…um. What did you do to Cherish?”  The girl shifted uneasily as she spoke, eyeing the door. Promethean bit her lip.

“Well, technically, Moord Nag’s shadow killed her.  I did help a bit.”

“Huh.” The girl shook her head.

“I got the impression that you weren’t exactly her friend, though?”

“ _Not_ exactly, no.” Her voice was familiar, Promethean thought.  She could almost place it. She was starting to inch backwards towards the door, her hands behind her back, reaching, Promethean was fairly certain, for a knife or a taser.  Maybe a gun.

She kept her voice low, held out her hands to show that they were empty.

“Don’t freak out.  You’re one of the Undersiders, aren’t you?  The new one?  The girl with the Stranger power?”  She remembered, now, chasing them through the gift shop at the Protectorate Headquarters. The Undersider had had the same recklessness, charging into the fight and assuming her power would work against Dragon’s suit.

“The new one?” the girl repeated.  The tilt of her head suggested that she was raising her eyebrows under the mask. She’d stopped inching backwards, though. “You realize that the Undersiders don’t, like, exist anymore, right? The team broke up?”

“Well,” said Promethean.  “Relatively speaking.”

“Am I going insane,” Saint asked, “or are you having a conversation with yourself?”

“It’s Imp, right?” said Promethean.  “Imp, can you stop using your power?”

“Oh, fuck it,” said Imp.  “I didn’t plan this very well.”

As far as Promethean could tell, nothing changed.  After a moment, however, Saint stopped looking between her and the door in confusion and jumped in his seat.

“Jesus Christ!” he said.  “How long were you standing there?”

Imp shrugged and pushed her mask back on her forehead to reveal her face. Despite the way she was eyeing Promethean suspiciously, she didn’t seem to be able to suppress a wicked grin.

“Well,” she said, holding up her hands, “I’ve only been _here_ for a couple of minutes, but before that I borrowed your keys to Quarry’s warehouse and fucked up all of her cocaine.”


	20. Chapter 20

As soon as Dragon passed through the Eastern Queens portal, the air thrummed with the noise of construction.  D.T. officers were stationed around the portal, a reminder that, isolated as it was in the Rockaways, it had only recently been reclaimed from local villains. A villain who held the island could control the portal, fighting off the Warden’s forces and ducking between worlds if they needed to retreat.  Now the Wardens, in charge for the moment, were working to convert the old elevated subway track, half destroyed by flooding, into a causeway that would connect the portal to the main city. 

She engaged the Melusine’s wings and sprang into the air.  She was already linked into the Wardens’ systems, had listened in on the D.T. officers as they confirmed that her passage through the portal was authorized.  Now, aloft, she looked again at the extent of the damage.  Beach houses were caved in, flooded, and  burned out or bombed where supervillains had used the surviving structures to launch their attacks or manage their operations.  If she looked toward the horizon, or patched herself into the available cameras, she could see Brooklyn, and beyond that the East River gleaming in the winter sun.  Not all of Manhattan’s skyscrapers had been destroyed, and more were going up every week, tenaciously. Their windows caught the light and threw it back towards her from across the water.

Behind her, Defiant took to the air in the Pendragon.

She could see the city through his eyes, too, and she did, ghosting through his cybernetics to watch his hands on the ship’s controls, hear the sound of his breathing. She stayed like that for a moment, watching through his eyes and her own without speaking.  Then she reached further, for the cameras in the Wardens’ headquarters.

They were more securely encrypted than the outer network, but it was nothing that she wasn’t capable of bypassing.  She ran through the unfamiliar protocols, adapted since the last time she’d looked over the Warden’s security, and after a few minutes she was inside. She took in the security footage, heroes going about their business, and those villains who were still detained or awaiting parole hearings.

When she spoke, it was in Defiant’s ear.

“ _The Wardens have tightened up the network security at their headquarters.”_

“Oh.” She felt him straighten up.  “Were you watching, just now?”

“ _For a minute or two. I’ll stop if it bothers you.”_

“No. Go ahead.”  Dragon heard him exhale, saw the skyline lurch forward and tilt through his eyes as he turned the Pendragon in a broad curve, following the Melusine’s lead.

She saw it, but in the cockpit of the Melusine, she bit her lip.  She knew, rationally, that he didn’t mind if she watched with him. That he hadn’t minded when she had in the past.  It had become a kind of ritual, when they were apart, her reaching out, however briefly, to look through his eyes and speak in his ear.

But now it was comforting and discomforting, riding with him, seeing what he saw.  She wanted the sense of his closeness, but she didn’t like the idea that she was, on some level, checking to make sure that he was still there, was still following her.  Monitoring him, as she’d agreed to do for the PRT when she’d made the deal for his release. Long ago, now. She wondered if he’d made the same comparison to himself.

“ _You can tell me, you know. If it bothers you.”_

“Dragon. I know.  Stay.”  He passed a hand over his face, and her vision inside the Pendragon went dark, for a moment. She heard him sigh. “Stay.”

“ _Okay_.”

“You were going to say something about the Wardens?  New security?”  He’d opened a schematic design on one of his monitors and was sketching as he spoke to her, writing adjustments.  “You think they’re worried about Teacher’s hackers?”

She hesitated, watching as he opened a new window, closed it, drummed his fingers against the Pendragon’s controls.  She shouldn’t have asked whether her presence was making him uncomfortable. Nothing that she said would sound casual now.

“ _It might be that_ ,” she said after a moment.  “ _It might also be that they’re worried about me.”_

“You?” He looked up, his gaze following the Melusine’s flight path across the sky.

_“You know why, Colin. It’s not—it’s nothing serious. If it’s even that.”_

“But you’re worried.”

“ _Only a little,”_ she admitted. “ _Teacher’s snuck through their security before.  It’s just that they didn’t ask me to look at it.”_

“You stopped his hackers once already.”

“ _I know.  I’m just nervous.  I’ve been out of touch, letting Masamune equip the Dragon’s Teeth…There are people I haven’t talked to, since before.  I’m worried things will be different.”_

In the weeks since she’d mended her programming and reestablished contact with the Wardens, she’d kept their conversations brief, managing what she had to via video conference. She wasn’t sure how quickly the news of her nature had diffused through their ranks, or how much they knew about exactly what Teacher had done to her during Gold Morning.  But it was quite certain that they knew.

She could see the Wardens’ headquarters now, from the Melusine as well as from the security cameras.  She could see people on the ground looking up as the ship banked and descended. The streets weren’t as busy as they had once been, but even now, people were going about their business, bicycling where the roads were too damaged to let cars pass, carrying groceries or clothes or construction materials.

“Don’t worry, Dragon,” said Defiant.  “It’s going to be alright.” 

She shifted, restlessly, and braced herself as the Melusine touched down in the center of an old traffic circle.  She wished she hadn’t said anything, now.  Her worries were probably paranoid, and she wasn’t sure what she’d hoped Colin would say about them.

She set the Melusine’s systems to idle, collected her laptop, and stepped out of the ship just as the Pendragon was landing, nose to tail with the Melusine. Three children stopped by the edge of the park to watch the ships, the tallest pulling back the youngest when she tried to run out into the street.  The middle child waved, and Dragon waved back.

The Pendragon’s doors opened with a hum.

“Ready?” Defiant asked. He was in full armor, his spear strapped across his back, the vents in his helmet closed to hide his face. Dragon’s own face was bare. It was becoming more common, now, for heroes to go unmasked.

But a glance at the camera feeds from the inside of the Warden’s headquarters showed her that the tradition of masks hadn’t been discarded entirely.

“I’m ready,” she said.

A familiar figure met them at the door to the Wardens’ headquarters. Seven feet tall, with long pale hair and a scaled suit made of thousands of violet-blue forcefields. The only clothing she wore was a white armband printed with a golden circle.  Narwhal.

She nodded, approvingly, when Dragon met her eyes.

“D.T. officers said you’d made it through the portal.  I thought I’d meet you, since it’s your first time here in person.” There was something formal about her voice, the way she stood with her shoulders squared, as if she were a sentry at attention.

“Thanks,” said Dragon.  “It’s…good to see you again.  I’m glad you’re alright.”

She held out her hand, and Narwhal took it and pulled her in for a hug, a little awkwardly, whether because of the jetpack that fanned out from Dragon’s back or because of Dragon’s own hesitation.  It took her a moment to get her arms around the other woman in return.

“It’s good to see you as well,” Narwhal said when she broke the hug.

Dragon smiled, and something fluttered nervously in her throat as she pulled away. Narwhal held out a hand to Defiant.

“Defiant. It’s been a while. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on hugging you.”

He nodded and took her hand.  Dragon heard the vents in his helmet open with a hiss as they both followed Narwhal into the building.

“The conference room’s on the tenth floor.”  Narwhal scanned her thumbprint on a pad beside the elevator as she spoke.

While they waited, talking about construction and what amenities were available in the new New York, Dragon watched the building’s camera footage. Two masked heroes passing behind her paused to give her and Defiant a long look.  They were new recruits, she thought, one dressed in a robe that resembled a monk’s, the other in a blue bodysuit and a mask with a winged design. She wasn’t sure whether they recognized her or were just curious about the newcomers.

She grimaced. She was being paranoid, again.

The elevator doors slid open soundlessly, and Dragon stepped aside to let the people inside get off.

And froze.

She didn’t know the first two who’d stepped off the elevator, but the last she recognized. She felt Defiant stiffen beside her.

The woman was dark-skinned and pretty, her hair cut short, close to her skull. When she looked over the group, her eyes widened.

“Dragon,” she said.  Stopping in her tracks.

Dragon met her gaze and realized that she was clenching her jaw. She could feel Defiant shifting next to her, as if he was getting ready to put himself between the two of them.

“I don’t think I ever got your name,” said Dragon.  She was surprised, distantly, by how detached her voice sounded.

“Margaret Walker,” said Defiant, before the woman could speak.  His voice was stiff was suppressed hostility.

The woman nodded.  “Dragon, I—”

Dragon stepped past her, onto the elevator, and hit the button to close the door. Defiant and Narwhal only barely made in it after her, wedging a force field between the doors as they closed. She caught just a glimpse of the former Dragonslayer’s face, frozen somewhere between fear and guilt, before the force field dissolved and the doors slid shut.

She felt Defiant’s hand on her shoulder, over her armor.  Heavy.

“Well,” said Narwhal.  “I’m really sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.”

“She works as a civilian tech specialist.  It’s a low-level job.”

“Network security, right?”  The mirrored walls of the elevator showed Dragon that she was pressing her lips together in a thin line.  She stopped.

Narwhal shrugged.  “I don’t actually know exactly what she’s doing.”

“Dragon,” Defiant said.  Softly.

“I said I was fine.”

The elevator opened onto the tenth floor.

“To the left,” said Narwhal.  Dragon could see the way that she was watching her out of the corner of her eye. As if she expected her to collapse, or cry, or turn back after the former Dragonslayer and do violence to her.

Dragon put her shoulders back and arranged her face until she was fairly sure that it was expressionless.

The conference room, when they arrived, was already mostly full. Chevalier stood up and held out his hand to Defiant, and then to her.  She half-listened to his greeting, said the appropriate words in reply. Legend stood behind him. She took her place at the foot of the table and began setting up her laptop. 

Soon she had a three-dimensional map projected down the length of the conference table. It showed Earth Bet and the earths beyond it, linked by golden chains that represented permanent portals from world to world. 

“As most of you are probably aware,” Dragon began, “several days ago, Defiant and I captured two ships belonging to Teacher, a former Birdcage resident who has set himself up in a private dimension and begun recruiting parahumans. Including former criminals taken from the Wardens’ own base.  I assume I don’t need to explain his powers again to anyone here.”

Around the table, there were nods.

“While analyzing the technology on Teacher’s captured ships, Defiant and I were able to decrypt the onboard communications system, which was designed specifically to carry communications back and forth from his locked dimension. This is what we found.”

A thought on Dragon’s part, and the map lit up with a rash of colored triangles, distributed across the worlds.

“The white and red triangles represent groups that Teacher has trade arrangements with. White represents communications about drugs, red about weapons.  As you can see, there are links with the Elite, with Marquis’s group, with the cartel in New York C, and with the Judges, who, you’ll recall, held the Eastern Queens portal in this city until recently.  Among others. I’m distributing a full list of confirmed transactions to your personal devices.”  The triangles she mentioned flared brighter as she spoke.

Dragon paused as the heroes bent to page through tablets or leaned forward to look more closely at points on the maps.  Where she saw people looking, she magnified the projection, trying not to wonder whether the few slight frowns she saw directed her way had anything to do with the ease with which she’d patched herself into the protected network and located their personal computers.

She found that she wasn’t particularly bothered by whether she was making them nervous.

“This leaves the orange markers.”  Another set of triangles flared to life on the map.  Too many of them. “These represent the communities that Teacher is controlling directly.  His communications with them deal with day-to-day administration, long-term goals, and principles for establishing territory and holding it.  There’s evidence to believe that the vast majority of them are run by parahumans who he’s either created or given power modifications—in return, of course, for the loyalty enforced by his talent.”

Heroes shifted uncomfortably in their seats as they traced the lines between Teacher’s territories, his trading partners, and the interworld portals.

“As some of you are no doubt seeing,” Dragon continued, “Teacher’s established territories follow a pattern.  They’re placed to control important resources—woods, farmland, mineral deposits. And, in many cases, the interworld portals.  Here,” and she zoomed in on one point of the map, “you can see that Teacher has two communities flanking the territory currently controlled by Harmonious Crane, who holds the Shin-Vav portal.  Closer to home, his pawns are placed to border the Judges’ territory.  Where they can seize a portal without confrontation, they’ve done so.  Where they can’t hold a portal without a drawn-out conflict, they’ve established territory as close as possible, and focused on building infrastructure while other parties wear themselves out fighting for control of the portals.”

“You think they’re going to move to take more territory once the competing factions are weakened by conflict,” said Chevalier.

Dragon nodded.

“I know the Wardens have previously said that moving against Teacher directly would take too many heroes away from more immediate problems, as well as costing you too much political capital among former villains.  But this is clearly the preparatory stage of an extensive interworld takeover.  If you don’t move against him, you’re going to be outflanked.”

“What’s his firepower like?” asked a hero at the middle of the table. He was masked, but his voice, high and a little reedy, was familiar.  Godsend, known as Galvanate during his days as a villain.  Sitting next to Brandish, formerly of New Wave. It almost made Dragon smile. “Teacher doesn’t produce many purely offensive capes, and his tinkers were never that good.”

Dragon felt her mouth tighten.  She cleared the projection from the table and replaced it with another, showing Teacher’s captured ships.

“It appears that Teacher’s tinkers are much more effective when they’re working off another tinker’s designs.  The ships we captured were based off of two models of my own, the Cawthorne Mark Three and the Pythios-Six.  The quality is comparable to the Dragonslayers’ technology, but based on the rate at which Teacher is trading for materials, his production line is much more extensive than theirs was.  He probably has similar ships in reserve.  I’ve prepared an estimate in the same document that details his communications.”

“So,” said Legend, his voice measured, “how much of your technology can we expect to see coming from Teacher?”

Dragon had expected that question.  She kept her face blank.

“He had unrestricted access to my designs during Gold Morning. Anything I made before then is something that he potentially has the ability to replicate.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Chevalier put a hand over his face.

Legend let out his breath. 

“I see.”

There was a silence in the room that stretched uncomfortably. Some of the assembled heroes paged through the information she’d prepared about Teacher’s operations. Others watched her, covertly or blatantly.  Dragon stood still, her hands resting lightly on either side of her laptop, which she hadn’t touched since she’d opened it.  Everything that she needed to do, she could do with her mind.

It wasn’t as if she had to pretend to be human.

Legend sighed.

“Alright. We’re going to need to call in the rest of our Thinkers, figure out which areas we need to prioritize. We can’t move against all of the territories at once, and we can’t ignore the other threats we’ve been dealing with. We may have to offer a deal to the Judges or to Crane, in return for their help.  For now, let’s adjourn.”

Chairs scraped as the heroes stood, looking, mostly, relieved to have put the decision off. Dragon dismissed her projections, closed her laptop.  When she turned Defiant was already behind her.  She could have said that he was hovering, but it made her smile when the back of her hand brushed against his.  They wouldn’t hold hands, not in front of the Wardens, but she liked knowing that he was near.

Chevalier and Legend were hanging back with Narwhal as the other Wardens filed out of the room.  Waiting for her.

“Dragon,” said Legend.  “Can we talk for a minute?”

“Go ahead.”

“I know you’re focusing on the settlements in your home world, getting them stable through the winter, and—”

“Go on.” She cut him off, and he frowned slightly under his blue and white mask.  “You want to ask me for something.  I’ll contribute to weapons production or infrastructure here.  I’m meeting with Masamune today to go over some issues with the D.T. systems.  I can bring up any requests you have then.”

Legend nodded, slowly.

“We’d like you to join the Wardens.  Formally. Defiant as well.”

Dragon paused, looking, for a moment, from Legend to Chevalier, to Narwhal.

“No,” she said.  “No, I don’t think I can do that.”

Narwhal put a hand on her arm.  “Dragon, if you think there’s going to be any issue with—with who you are, you should know that everyone here is on your side.”

The concern in her voice was genuine, but Dragon shook her head again.

Chevalier cleared his throat.  “Narwhal mentioned you ran into Margaret Walker in the elevators.  You know she could be reassigned, if it makes you more comfortable. Or…”

He let the sentence trail off, suggestively.  Dragon frowned.

“Thank you. But the answer’s still no. You’re welcome to come to me for assistance.  I’ll help in any way I can.  But I’m staying independent, for now.  I want to be able to set my own priorities.”

“If you reconsider…” Legend began.

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“Defiant?” said Chevalier. 

Colin shook his head.

“Dragon and I are a team.  If she doesn’t want to join, then I can’t accept.”

They walked to the elevator, and Narwhal fell into step beside Dragon.

“How long are you in town?”

“We’re leaving tonight, probably.”

“You have time for dinner?  Me, Chevalier, maybe one or two of the old Guild members?”

Dragon hesitated, and Narwhal frowned.

“Or if you don’t, um, do dinner, we could just get coffee.  We actually have coffee again, now.”

Dragon smiled.

“No, dinner’s fine.  Just let me know what time.”

The elevator doors opened, and Narwhal waved.

“I should get back to work.  But I’ll see you at…around seven?”

“Sure.” Dragon held the door while Defiant said goodbye to Chevalier.  When he’d stepped inside the elevator and the doors slid shut behind him, she reached for his hand and squeezed it.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She sighed.  “I just want to go home.”

“We can go, if you want.  You can do the conference with Masamune remotely.”

Dragon smiled, squeezed his hand tighter.  “Colin. You’re supposed to tell me that I have obligations, and I should keep them.”

He shook his head, ruefully.  “If you’re looking for someone to be your conscience, I’m not a very good choice. To be honest, I’d be perfectly happy if we left now as well.”

Dragon sighed.  “No. I should stay.”

She closed her eyes, and when she spoke to him again it was privately, in the voice that echoed inside his head and his head alone.  “ _You could talk to me about what we’re going to do, once we’re home.  I might not mind waiting, if I had something to look forward to.”_

He laughed, and as he bent his head to kiss her, she reached into the Warden’s network and tweaked the camera in the elevator, so that the feed fizzled out. Just for a moment.


	21. Chapter 21

The arms dealers arrived with Dobrynja at six the next morning.  The sun was just up and the streets were frozen over, a layer of ice forming over the snow where it had melted in the sun and then frozen overnight.  Promethean was in the town square to meet them, but she hung back, next to Saint, while the miners’ coalition finalized the deal.  Their spokesman was a man named Seamus Kelly, burly, Irish, a former union organizer who seemed, as he gestured expansively at the shipment and went over the fine details of payment, to be in his element.

Beside her, Saint yawned, and Dobrynja, still wearing the Wyrmiston suit, clapped him on the back and grinned.

“Wake up, Saint.  You’re going to have to tell me how things have changed since I was last here.”

Saint shook his head.  “More than you know. I’ll tell you everything once we’re done supervising.”

Promethean kicked at the layer of ice that had formed on the steps to Quarry’s headquarters overnight and toyed with the sleeve of her sweater, pulling it down until it half covered the exposed cybernetics of her left hand. Dobrynja didn’t seem to have noticed.

The negotiation ended, Kelly directing the rest of the assembled miners to load the weapons into the dealers’ trucks.  A girl with short, tousled black hair and a devilish grin appeared at the door of Quarry’s compound and slid down the steps on the seat of her pants, wrapping herself around Dobrynja’s armored ankle at the bottom.  She looked about eight years old, with the delicate features that marked her as one of Heartbreaker’s children.

“Aren’t you a little bit old to be doing that?” he asked her, bending down to give her his hand.  Saint caught his arm before he could finish the gesture.

“Striker power.  Trust me, you _don’t_ want to touch her.”

“Come here, Flor,” said Promethean, prying the girl off of Dobrynja and lifting her into the air.  Flor draped herself over Promethean’s shoulder, clinging like a monkey or a much younger child and giggling silently.  “You aren’t even wearing a coat.  You’re going to freeze to death.”

“Inside?” asked Saint. “We have some things to talk about.”

“You’re not going to offer me breakfast?”

Saint shook his head.  “Better if we have this discussion in private.”

Saint led the way up the stairs, Dobrynja following and looking curiously between him and Promethean, who tried to smile back at him.  She could have put Flor down once they were inside, but instead she shifted the girl’s weight slightly on her hip and carried her into Quarry’s office after Saint and Dobrynja.  The gray light filtering in through the windows made the room look pallid and a little dirty.  Promethean had left a series of half-disassembled small tinkertech projects that she’d been working on during the night lined up on the floor around the desk, and Dobrynja glanced over them curiously.

“So,” he said after Saint had closed the door.  “You have news.”

Saint opened his mouth, but Promethean spoke first.

“I’d kind of like you to finish your half of our agreement first, Saint.”

Saint nodded. “Right.  Dobrynja, can I have the drive with Ascalon on it?”

There was a long pause as Dobrynja looked from Saint to Promethean, his eyebrows raised. But when he spoke it was only to Saint.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Flor squirmed, and Promethean realized that she’d accidentally tightened her grip on the girl’s shoulders. She patted her on the back and made herself exhale.  Dobrynja glanced at her, his expression carefully bland, and she saw his eyes move to where her left hand was pressed against Flor’s shoulders, its workings gleaming even in the weak light.

Saint sighed. “Trust me, D.”

“So,” he said.  “You’re Dragon.”

“I’m not quite Dragon.”  Her voice was quiet.

Dobrynja nodded. “You’d be an earlier backup, no?  How far back?”

“June 2011.”

Saint rubbed his eyes with one hand.

“You’re having a lot less trouble adjusting to this than I did.”

Dobrynja shrugged. “I wondered, before.  It made a lot of things make sense.”

“You— _what?_ ” said Saint. “You _knew,_ and you didn’t say anything _?_ ”

He shook his head.  “Not for certain. But I had some time to think, after I left the Pyrphoros, and it seemed like a strange coincidence, that we would find a friend who can hack Tinker-made computer systems in a few minutes, who doesn’t kill, and doesn’t sleep, and knows Defiant well enough to call in a favor for your sake, even though he hates you.”

Saint rolled his eyes.  “Fuck you, D. You’re making it sound like it was _obvious_.”

“Oh, you didn’t figure it out yourself then?  Did she _tell_ you?” Dobrynja smiled.

“Saint,” said Promethean.  She hadn’t spoken sharply, but his attention snapped towards her as soon as she’d said his name. “I’d like the program.  Like we agreed.”

She made herself breathe slowly, focusing on the weight of Flor’s arms around her neck. They were both watching her, the Dragonslayers.

“Mischa?” said Saint.

“You trust her?”

“Yeah. We made a deal.”

Dobrynja nodded, and a gesture released the catch on the armored compartment at the back of the Wyrmiston suit.  He took the drive out, handed it to Saint.

“Thanks. It’s yours, Promethean.”

She reached for the drive, and Saint held onto it.

“Remember, you’re copying it and you’re giving it back to me.  I’m trusting you to keep your word.”

“I will.”

Saint let go, and Promethean held onto Flor one-handed while she tucked the drive into the pocket of her pants.  It was surprising, how small it was.  She could feel its weight against her thigh, and she couldn’t help thinking that it should have been heavier.

Hers. She closed her eyes for a moment and smiled into Flor’s hair, trying to calm the fluttering nervousness that ran through her.  Richter’s work. Richter’s will.

“What else did I miss?”  asked Dobrynja.

Saint snorted.  “Mostly things you were lucky to.  When we got here one of a clone of Cherish had taken over.  Promethean fought her.  Anyway, it turns out Quarry was working for Teacher.  He’s running a little puppet show, setting up his students with territories and controlling things behind the scenes.  Promethean’s working on decoding their communications.”

“I’m done, actually.  I decrypted Quarry’s com unit while the rest of you were sleeping.”  She shifted her grip on Flor so that she could touch the drive in her pocket, and the girl squirmed and buried her face in Promethean’s shoulder.

“Promethean thinks we can work together to make Teacher’s life a little bit harder,” Saint started, only to pause as the door clicked open, and Imp staggered in, unmasked and yawning.

“Fuck it, guys, I lost a rugrat.  Have you seen—oh, okay.  Flor. You got her.”  She yawned, enormously, and at the same moment Promethean felt a lancing pain run down her shoulder.  She squeaked.

“Ouch, Flor, did you just _bite_ me? You are definitely too old to bite people!”

Flor grinned silently and pointed at the floor.  When Promethean set her down—a little bit gingerly, in case she decided to bite again—she ran towards the door and launched herself at Imp’s knees with enough force that the girl rocked back into the doorframe.

“No, it’s too early.  Go torment the robot chick.”

Promethean caught Saint grinning as she rubbed her shoulder where Flor had bitten her. “What are you laughing at? That _hurt_.”

He held up his hands.  “Well, I wouldn’t usually say this to someone I’d seen get her arm ripped off in a fight and barely pause, but you’re kind of a wimp.”

“She bit me really hard,” Promethean muttered.

“Yeah, she does that,” said Imp. “At least she can’t make you sing the teapot song.”

Saint raised his eyebrows.

“What?” said Imp.  “I told her no using her power to make people slice up their own faces, or starve themselves, or…well, basically, now she makes people sing the teapot song.  Or, um, once she did the song that never ends. That was kind of awkward, we couldn’t get that dude to stop.”

“Right,” said Promethean.  “Now that we’re all in the same room, maybe we can talk about plans?  I cracked the encryption on Quarry’s com unit last night after you all went to bed, so we have new intelligence to work with.”

Imp wrinkled her nose.  “Coffee. I want coffee before we do this.”

“We’re working with the kid, too?” asked Dobrynja, his eyes falling skeptically on Imp.

“Hey, watch who you’re calling a kid.  I am a _super_ villain, and professional non-assassin, and if you piss me off I can totally hide your pants every time you try to pee.”  Imp paused to yawn again.

“And here I’m sure you thought working with Dragon was going to be the difficult part,” Saint murmured.  Dobrynja snorted, only for his grin to be replaced with the momentary confusion that Promethean was quickly beginning to recognize as a sign that Imp was using her power.

“What was I just saying?” Saint asked.

Promethean sighed.  “Imp has tracked down a few of Teacher’s pawns on her own, and she’s interested in working with us. Is what she was trying to say.”

Imp pouted. “I thought what I said was totally clear.”

Promethean caught Saint watching her surreptitiously from the corner of her eye. She could feel the Ascalon drive where it hung against her hip, and she kept wanting to touch it and check that it was there.  She wanted time to look at its contents.  She wanted them out of the room.

“What I’m working on right now,” said Promethean, preempting Imp’s next comment, “is going through the communications to get a model of Teacher’s objectives. If you all want to go get breakfast, I can probably have that done by the time you get back.”

Dobrynja nodded.  “I remember last time I was here, they had hot showers.”

“Still do,” said Saint. He held open the door, but paused after Imp and Dobrynja had walked through it.

“You’re going to look at Ascalon, aren’t you?”  His voice was pitched just above a whisper.

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

He shook his head.  “No. I agreed.  I just wish I was a little bit more certain about what I’d agreed to.”

She bit her lip.  “It might be nothing.”

But it couldn’t be nothing.  The casing of the drive felt electric where it touched her skin. 

“I guess we’ll see soon,” said Saint.  Then he followed Dobrynja, leaving the door open behind him.  Promethean closed it and leaned against the wood.

She held the drive in her hands until it warmed to her skin.  It was compact, black, unremarkable.  Richter’s last legacy.

A breath. She crossed the room to Quarry’s computers, sat down in front of them.  She connected the drive and watched its contents load.

 

-

 

Promethean could hear them talking as they came back along the hallway. Imp talking, mostly. The others, if they were replying, were doing so quietly, but Imp’s voice was pitched to carry.

“So,” she was saying, “seeing as you used to have access to Dragon’s systems, I have a burning question.  Like, life or death here.”

They’d be at the door in a minute.  She’d barely looked at the data from Teacher’s communications.  She sighed.

“Here it is,” said Imp. “I want to know: did you ever watch Dragon have sex?”

Saint’s answer, if he replied at all, was inaudible.

Promethean put her head in her hands.

“I mean, no shame,” Imp was saying.  “We all get the temptation sometimes.  I’ve been there.”

The door handle turned, but the door only rattled in its frame.  She’d bolted it.  She unlocked it now, and found herself face to face with Saint, who jumped a little when she opened the door.  Behind him, Imp was grinning.

She held the door half-open, sighed.

“I’m not done with Teacher’s communications.  Can you guys come back?  I need a little bit more time alone.”

She was fairly sure that her expression was calm.  Her eyes didn’t get bloodshot when she cried, and she’d already dried her face.

Imp nodded understandingly.  “Right, _alone_ time. No problem.”

Promethean tried to close the door, and Saint wedged his shoulder into the gap between the door and its frame.  She glared at him. He didn’t move.

“I guess it didn’t work?”

She couldn’t flush, but she felt hot and sticky and humiliated. She shook her head.

“No. It didn’t work. Move, please.”

“What didn’t work?” said Imp.

“Come on, Promethean, let me in.”  He was still blocking her from shutting the door.  She could see the curiosity in Imp’s eyes as she looked between them. She pulled the door wide enough for Saint to step inside, and closed it again before Imp could slip in after him.

Saint raised his eyebrows.

“That was a little bit harsh.”

“What do you want, Saint?”  She leaned against the door, her arms crossed, as he looked idly at Quarry’s computer systems.

“I thought _you_ might want to talk to someone.”

“I don’t. Not to you, anyway.” She scuffed the toe of her boot against the floor.  Her skin prickled. “I just need an hour, and I’ll be fine.”

“You really thought it was going to work.”  She watched Saint’s feet as he turned, half-pacing.  She didn’t want to meet his eyes.

“Well, it seems pretty stupid in retrospect, but yeah.  I did.”  She bit her lip when she felt her vision begin to blur.  No, she wouldn’t cry in front of him.  Not again. When thinking didn’t help, she shut off her tears and dashed a hand across her eyes.  “I thought that there would at least be something for me. An explanation, or—I don’t know.”

Instead, the code was incomprehensible.  She could load it onto the computer screens, she knew it was displayed, but she couldn’t look at it.  When she did, her mind wavered, swam, refused to translate the individual symbols in coherent strings of code.  It was like trying to think of nothing—she read through it, and her mind refused to process what she was reading.  She couldn’t remember it. She couldn’t understand what it was supposed to do.

Richter had coded it into her blind spot.

She crossed her arms and jerked her head towards the console. “I guess you might as well take it back.  I can’t do anything with it.”

She heard Saint sigh.

“No. Keep it.”

She looked up at him, startled.  He was looking at the code displayed on the screen, scrolling down.

“What?”

He looked at her sidelong, his mouth twisted wryly. “I said you can keep it. There’s…not much point working together if you think I’m going to take the next opportunity to deactivate you.”

Promethean almost laughed.  “And since Richter didn’t make any provisions to remove my restrictions, I’m not a threat anyway?”

“No.” He snorted. “I’m not that stupid. I saw you fight Cherish, remember? I think if you really wanted to get rid of me, you’d figure out a way.”

“Yes. I probably would.”

She closed her eyes, watched the darkness behind her eyelids.  The silence hung in the air.

“Defiant said you had a trigger event.” 

“What?” She blinked.  Saint was looking at her intently, a frown creasing his forehead. “That’s not true.  When did he even say that?”

“When I was in Protectorate custody.  It was May ninth, 2006.  I realized later that it would have been the anniversary of Richter’s death.”

She shook her head.  “I don’t remember anything happening on that day.”

She could call up the date from her memory.  But it had been normal.  Not a good day, but one like any other.

“Your code changed.  All at once. I saw it.”

“I don’t—I don’t remember that happening.”  She was shaking her head again, running through the date in the back of her mind. “I remember watching the Newfoundland memorial service, feeling useless.  But I used to feel that way a lot.  There wasn’t anything different about that day.”

“But something changed.” Saint’s voice was insistent, but she wasn’t sure why he was trying to convince her.  She could remember it, waiting in her workshop, watching the news, the image of Richter stooped over the bed as she warned him about the oncoming waves, too stunned to try and escape.  But she’d thought about that a thousand times, in that year.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Saint ran a hand through his hair, scowling.  “I’m just thinking.”  He shook his head. “I wonder if Richter realized that that could happen.  That he’d made you human enough.  He definitely didn’t warn me.”

“I’m _not_ human, Saint. I’m not even slightly human.”

She’d started having ideas that day, she remembered.  New techniques, ways to update old technology.

Saint was frowning at her.

“I thought you’d want to emphasize how human you are.”

“Well, I’m not and I don’t.”  She bit her lip. “So you can stop looking at me like you’re waiting for me to fail the Turing test.  It’s tiresome.”

Saint held his hands up. “I’m sorry.  About Richter.”

“Fuck Richter.” She was clenching her teeth, and she couldn’t seem to stop.  She swallowed. “I thought I could have changed his mind, if I’d just had more time. I feel so stupid. He didn’t even leave anything for me.”

“He called you his daughter,” said Saint.

“But he didn’t act like I was.  You don’t cripple your own daughter, and you don’t leave instructions on how to kill her in your will.  Usually.”

She bit her tongue, forced herself to stop talking.  She could almost forget that she was speaking to Saint, who’d spent years trying to stop her from breaking her restrictions. On Richter’s request.

She looked him in the eyes.  She knew that she should care what he thought.  Even without Ascalon, he was still dangerous to her if he decided to be.  But she couldn't make herself care.

“I’m sorry,” Saint said again.

She closed her eyes.  “I hate being like this.”

“Like what?” Saint’s voice was curious.

“Blind. Crippled.  Chained.  I know what I could be, and I’m not even half of it.”  She opened her eyes.  Saint was watching her, from the desk, his face twisted.  She didn’t know if his expression was sympathy or something else.

She couldn’t fix the situation with Dragon.  She’d have to stay like this, trapped in one body, without her network access, her abilities further diminished for fear of losing her memories.  For fear of shutting Dragon down as well.

“Well.” She laughed, before he could say anything.  “You asked me if I wanted to talk.”

“Right.” She saw the tension go out of his posture, as if he’d let out a long breath.  “Do you want a hug?  I realize I’m not your favorite person, but…”

She realized she had her own arms crossed over her chest, hugging her shoulders. She grimaced.  She hadn’t noticed that she was doing that.

“Maybe?” she said, uncrossing her arms slowly.  “Kind of?”

Saint held out a hand.  “Come here.”

She let him take her hand and pull her against his chest. They were the same height.  She bent down until she could rest her forehead on his shoulder. She could feel the pulse in his neck, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

“Don’t try to kiss me or anything, okay?” she said.

“Sure, Promethean.” He let out a sharp breath, not quite laughing.  “I did get the idea after the second time you mentioned it.”

“I just wanted to check.”

“Sure.”

She stayed that way for a minute, not speaking.  She was half pretending he was Colin, guiltily, although his height and his scent and all the other details were wrong.

There was no solution.  No code from Richter that would let her change, make her whole.  She’d have to go on with what she already had.

A knock sounded on the door.  Then Imp’s voice.

“Hey, whatever the fuck you’re doing in there, something actually important just happened! Open the door!”

When she unlocked the door, Imp was glaring and tapping her foot on the ground.

“Took you long enough.”

“What happened?”

Imp took a deep breath.  “Samuel just got a call from back home.  Teacher bombed my base.”

Promethean went still. “The rest of Heartbreaker’s kids?”

Imp shook her head.  “They’re okay, mostly. Victoire has a danger sense, and she got them out.  Juliette’s hurt, but no one’s dead. They’ve been trying to put out the fires.”

Imp crossed her arms and looked around the room.

“So let’s get planning, okay?  I want to make that asshole bleed.”


	22. Chapter 22

“So, tell me. How have you been? It’s been a long time.”

Chevalier laughed shortly.  “I’m not the one who descended into radio silence, Defiant.  You weren’t exactly in a hurry to get back in touch.”

The two men were keeping their voices low, but Dragon, walking ahead with Narwhal, could still hear their conversation through Defiant’s cybernetics. Electricity in New York still wasn’t reliable, and so for once the city streets were dark, street lights burnt out or toppled and only the occasional lamp shining in an apartment window. Narwhal’s forcefields created a soft nimbus of light around her as she walked, and the people they passed stepped out of her way and turned to watch her.  Or them.  Three armored figures, and one dressed only in light.

“ _You don’t mind that I’m listening, do you?”_ she asked, to Defiant alone.

She felt him smile, shake his head.  Chevalier looked at him sideways.

“I know. Sorry.”  He turned his attention back to Chevalier. “I should have gotten back in touch earlier, but we’ve been focused on Teacher.  And the new settlement.  It’s a little bit strange, coming back.”

Chevalier sighed.  “I know the feeling. I’ve been restless ever since I got back to New York.  I know it’s not because I don’t have enough work to do, but…I can’t seem to get rid of it. There’s too much rebuilding, too many villains.  The new people with the uncontrollable powers.  It’s like one of those stories where the hero has to empty a river with a sieve.”

“Maybe you need a vacation.  Have you talked to Hannah?  You could spend some time on Gimel.”

“No, I haven’t talked to Hannah since Valkyrie’s induction to the Wardens.” He paused.  “We could use you, Defiant.  If you wanted to come back.”

In the Wardens’ offices, meanwhile, a security camera showed Dragon that Margaret Walker was working late.  She was frowning at her monitor, writing adjustments on an algorithm that was intended to track villains’ communications across the interworld portals.

Dragon tapped into her computer’s camera, and she could see the slight crease between her eyebrows, the puffiness around her eyes.  The way her gaze darted to the screen and back to her hands, as if she was looking straight at Dragon.

“Working late, Mags?” a D.T. officer asked, passing behind her desk to look at her screen.

“Yeah. I want to get this done before I go. It should only take a few more minutes.”

“Well, you can work all night if you want to, but I’m going home.”

She sighed and rubbed her eyes.  Tired. The code she was working on was messy, and it was getting worse the more she toyed with it.  She wouldn’t finish it tonight.

Dragon bit her lip.

She knew that she ought to stop.  It was invasive. It was doing bad things to her mood.

She wondered whether Margaret Walker had ever thought anything similar, in the years that she’d had access to Dragon’s systems.  Had she ever felt guilty, when she sat with Saint and planned how to separate Dragon from her suits and wipe her memory?  When she decided to activate Richter’s kill program and stop the hunt for the Nine to keep herself from being caught?

She wondered how many times someone else had been watching, in the moments when she thought she was alone.

“You seem distracted,” said Narwhal.

Dragon smiled at her. 

“I am, a little.  I didn’t think it was that obvious.”

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“Mm. I’m eavesdropping on Chevalier and Defiant.”

Narwhal cast a glance over her shoulder at the two men, who were trailing behind them by half a block.

“Anything interesting?”  If she wondered how Dragon was listening, she didn’t show it.

Dragon shrugged.  “It sounds like Chevalier hasn’t given up on getting at least one of us to join the Wardens.”

Narwhal laughed.  “You can probably expect the hard sell over dinner, as well.  I’ll say sorry in advance.”

“Not from you, though?”  Dragon ran a hand over the armored braces on her forearms, feeling the raised designs under her fingertips.  “It might be your last chance for a while.”

The overlapping forcefields that Narwhal wore over her face made her expression a little bit hard to read, but Dragon could see the frown that creased her forehead. Her horn dipped towards Dragon.

“I thought you were working with us on Teacher?”

“Oh, I am. Of course I am.”

Narwhal sighed.

“You could always keep in touch, you know.  After everything that’s happened…it matters, who fought beside you. The ones who are still alive.”

Dragon saw her fingers drift to her armband, touch the golden circle, before her hand fell back to her side.

In the Wardens’ headquarters, Margaret Walker was rubbing her forehead with one hand. She peered at her algorithms one last time, packed her bags, and stood, and Dragon watched her as she walked down the hall and stepped onto the elevator.

“Thanks. And I’m sorry.” Outside the Wardens’ headquarters, security cameras showed a pair of D.T. officers coming off duty. Two teenagers crossed the empty traffic circle, walking hand in hand, and paused to look at the squat shape of the Melusine, with its banked wings.  Margaret Walker was still in the elevator, sorting through the contents of her purse.  “I would have tried to talk to you sooner, but…”

Narwhal held up her hands.  “I didn’t mean it like that.  I mean, I understand why you would want to take a break.”

Dragon nodded, but she was distracted.  Only half focused on Narwhal, the feeling of her feet on the pavement, the crisp cold of the night air.  She could hear Defiant and Chevalier talking, could sense the restless energy in Chevalier’s movements, the way he flexed his hands where he thought no one could see.

A side effect of Ingenue’s power.  It changed the ones she used it on, more than a little.  She’d seen it before.

Chevalier must have noticed.  She wondered whether they tiptoed around him, as well, in the Wardens’ headquarters.

She wasn’t broken.  Not any more than any of the others.  But she couldn’t slow herself down, couldn’t pause, couldn’t look away from the fucking Dragonslayer, even when she knew that it was bad for her.  She was leaving the Wardens’ headquarters now.  Standing straight and still in front of Dragon’s ship, but her back was to the light and her face was in shadow and Dragon couldn’t make out her expression.  She couldn’t look away. Not until the other woman turned and walked into the darkness.

And if she wanted to make herself unhappy, she had the copy’s memories as well, lying uneasily at the back of her mind.  The thought of her with Defiant.  Of her with Saint.

“Thanks,” she said to Narwhal, again.  And looked up to see her slight nod.

She remembered when Narwhal had first manifested her ability to bypass the Manton effect with her forcefields, in the days when Dragon had been new to the Guild. How no one had ever quite spoken about what had caused that, either.

She wasn’t broken, or else they all were.  They mended themselves, the same way that they’d mend the world. They had to.

“Tell me where we’re going?” she asked.  They were walking down Ninth Avenue, and the street was eerily quiet.

“Oh, we’re right around the corner,” said Narwhal.  “It’s a Korean restaurant, not fancy, but they have a little back room that they usually save for capes coming off duty, so we won’t stand out.”

Dragon smiled.  “So I should be prepared for a roomful of people with glowing horns?”

“Mm. Only about a quarter. The rest will be eight-foot-tall Tinkers in full power armor.”  She tilted her head back towards Defiant.

But in fact, when they’d arrived at the restaurant and the host had led them past the steaming kitchens and into the back room, there were only two capes in evidence, a pair of teenaged girls who’d thrown their domino masks down on the table beside them.  One of them, whose costume was a searing shade of pink, interspersed with gleaming panels that looked like armor but probably didn’t offer much protection, waved enthusiastically at Narwhal as she walked in.  The other was drabber, and shyer.  A new cape, Dragon thought.

The room itself was plain, low-ceilinged, with a door that opened out onto a space halfway between a courtyard and an airshaft.  It was propped open slightly to keep the heat from the kitchen from becoming oppressive, and Dragon took the seat nearest to it and shook out her hair until she could feel the draft against her neck.  Defiant propped his spear against the wall and sat next to her.

The warmth of the room and the scent of cooking from the kitchen and the sound of the two teenage capes laughing quietly at their table was working its way into her, slowly.  She leaned across the table, listening to Chevalier describe how the Wardens had reclaimed the Eastern Queens portal, and she found herself smiling without having to remind herself to do so.  They laughed when the electricity shorted out, sitting in companionable darkness while the waiter ran and started the backup generator with a rumble. 

When the food arrived, she slid her chair closer to Defiant and stole spoonfuls of his soup.

“You know you can order your own, right?” Chevalier asked with a grin.

“I know. But it feels a little bit wasteful. I don’t _need_ to eat.  It’s just fun.”

“You can probably tell we’ve had this conversation once or twice before,” said Defiant.

She laughed, and in the back of her mind, the Melusine pinged one of her subroutines. She’d set the ship’s systems to relay any messages it received on Teacher’s copied console. Now she retrieved the communications data and read through it.

The warmth of the room went out of her.

They were still laughing together, Defiant, Chevalier, Narwhal.  She stood, abruptly, and her chair toppled backwards, and they all turned to look at her as it clattered to the floor.

“I have to go.”

“What happened?”  Defiant was on his feet, and she already had the antigravity panels on her jetpack activated, making her movements light.  Her feet were barely touching the floor.  It might have felt like vertigo, if she knew what vertigo felt like.  She couldn’t unfurl the flight pack’s full wingspan inside, but she was only steps from the door.  Narwhal and Chevalier were standing now, too.

“Dragon. What happened?” Defiant’s voice was alarmed, now.

She saw the two teenaged capes startle when they heard her name.

Defiant’s hand was on her arm.  She thought the words would stick on her tongue, but she opened her mouth and they rolled out.

“Saint just contacted Teacher.  He’s offering him Promethean’s identity.”

She could see Narwhal and Chevalier glance at each other, from the corner of her eye. But it was only Defiant that she cared about.  He’d gone impossibly still.

“No.” The look on his face made some phantom pain run through her.  She closed her eyes.

“I have his coordinates from the com unit.  I can’t—I can’t leave her there.  Not with him.  I can’t.”

Had she ever been so stupid?  Stupid and trusting. She’d let Saint find out her identity.

But she couldn’t leave her.  Not like this. Not again.

Defiant’s spear was in his hand, the visor on his helmet lowered to cover his face.

“Send the coordinates to the Pendragon.  We’ll stop it.  We’ll get there in time.”

“What’s going on?” Narwhal looked between them.

“I’ll explain later.”  And she was out the door, in the courtyard, her flightpack expanding until its wings nearly brushed the walls on either side of her, taking her airborne.  Defiant followed, and soon the ground was rushing past underneath them as Dragon wove a path between buildings and new construction.

“We’ll get there.”  She wasn’t sure if Defiant’s words were for her or himself.  “We’ll get there in time.”

 


	23. Chapter 23

It was night, and they were standing on the cliff top.  Below, lights glimmered from the windows of a few houses. Saint checked the time on the screen of his com unit and let out a breath.  His hands were cold, even through his gloves.

“You’d better get back down the cliff before they get here,” he said to Dobrynja.

The other man shook his head. 

“I’d feel a lot better about this if I was going in with you.”  His jaw was set, stubbornly, and Saint recognized the expression. Mischa having a hunch. He was right sometimes—often enough. He’d warned him when he first went back to Teacher.  Not that that had stopped him. Now, Saint sighed.

“Not after you broke me out, D.  Better if he thinks we’ve split.  I don’t want to give him an excuse to shoot me.”

Dobrynja snorted.  “That’s not what you’re doing right now?”

“Trust me. One hour.  I’ll be back.”

“I hate this plan, Saint.  I have a very bad feeling about it.”

Saint sighed again. “Go, Mischa.  You can’t be here when he opens the portal.”

Dobrynja clapped him on the back, once.

“Good luck. Don’t die.”

And then he started down the path and Saint was alone on the cliff. He stamped his feet in the snow. Checked the screen of his com unit again, and the attachment clipped to his ear.  Checked his gun in its shoulder holster.  His breath turned to fog in the cold night air.

He didn’t jump when the portal opened, but it was a near thing. Florescent light sliced the night in front of him, and suddenly the air on his face was warm.  He raised an arm to shield his eyes against the sudden light. Three figures stepped out of the portal, lit from behind.  He recognized the middle one’s horned mask.

“Coming back to the fold, Saint?  I confess, I didn’t quite think you were going to be here.”

“Satyr.” His voice sounded a little hoarse. “I said I wanted to talk to Teacher personally.”

“And he sent me to make sure that you weren’t waiting at the door with a Tinker-made bomb. Don’t worry, you’ll get your interview.” As his eyes adjusted to the light from the portal, Saint saw that Satyr was shirtless, as was his usual habit. If he was cold, he didn’t show it.

One of the students stepped forward and began to pat him down with some kind of handheld device that beeped periodically.  She found his gun quickly, unloaded it, and circled behind him while he held out his arms.

“He’s okay,” she said at length.  “He’s not carrying anything.”

“Good,” said Satyr.

He saw Satyr’s smile as the student placed a hand between his shoulder blades and pushed him forward.

“Come inside, Saint.  You don’t want to keep Teacher waiting.”

He stepped through the portal.

Inside, it was the same as it had always been.  The Doormaker machine was a hub at the center of the room, and around it students circled, their footsteps echoing into empty space. Computer terminals lined the outer walls, each screen with its own attendant, and, looking at them, he could already feel the rush of scrolling through that data, hands guided by a knowledge that wasn’t his own.  The power’s clarity, and the way that everything else in the world seemed dull in comparison.

He was sweating.  He could see the eyes of the student who’d taken his gun, the way they never quite focused on the things she was looking at.

“Saint.” Teacher’s voice wasn’t loud, but it carried clearly.  When Saint turned, he saw that Teacher was holding out his hands, smiling, as if he was surveying his domain. “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble.”

“Well, you did fuck me over pretty badly.” 

He didn’t stammer.  He hated how grateful he was for that.

Teacher’s smile widened.

“Aren’t we putting that behind us?  Unless, of course, your information isn’t as good as you say it is…”

“It’s good,” said Saint.

“Then do share.”

Saint drew in a breath.  “We were going to discuss payment.”

Teacher held out his hand, two fingers raised, as if he was giving a blessing.

“Name your price.”

“You’re an idiot if you think I’m going to let you use your power on me again. I asked for resources.” But he could feel his eyes sliding away from Teacher’s, towards the computer terminals that lined the room. He didn’t know how long had passed since he stepped through the portal.  He forced himself to breathe slowly, but it was obvious from Satyr’s smirk and Teacher’s chilly smile that he wasn’t succeeding in looking calm.

“You know,” said Teacher, “I thought we could talk about this courteously. We did work together, successfully, for a while.”

“Alright,” said Saint.  “Let’s be professional. I know you’re reproducing Dragon’s technology.  I want suits to replace the ones I lost.  Weapons as well.”

“Done. Assuming your information is useful.”

“I’d like to check them over first.  Make sure you not giving me something defective.”

Teacher stared at him, letting the silence stretch.  After a moment, when Saint didn’t say anything further, he sighed.

“Saint, this is tiresome.  Either you have information, or you don’t.  Tell me what you know, and I’ll send you on your way with your toys.  That’s all you have to do.”  His hands were out, placating.  As if he were about to reach out and touch him.  Saint knew that Teacher’s power took concentration to work, but he felt himself go tense anyway.

He could see the horns of Satyr’s mask dip in his peripheral vision as the parahuman shifted. His chest was tight. He could see a little flurry of activity at the terminal to his right, one student leaning across to ask another a question.  He could remember exactly what it was like.  Teacher’s granted skills faded, but the things he’d learned with them didn’t, or not completely. He could remember all the details of the systems he’d worked on.  Not where he’d slept while he was in the base, or even if he’d slept. Not the names of any of the other students.  Not even their faces. Teacher was smiling. Where his hair was receding, his forehead reflected the light.

“Actually, Teacher, I don’t think I’m going to give you that name.  Although it’s a pleasure to be able to tell you to go fuck yourself in person.”

He hadn’t known quite what he was going to say until the words were out of his mouth. Maybe Dobrynja had been right.

He took a step towards Teacher, and Satyr’s hand closed around his shoulder and pulled him back.  But Teacher held up a hand, and he let go.  Saint crossed his arms and looked Teacher in the eyes.

“I didn’t take you for a martyr, Saint.  What did you think was going to happen, after you walked in here, alone, with nothing to give me?”

And finally, finally, the com unit clipped to his ear went live, and Promethean’s voice sounded through it.

_“And I’m online. Imp, get into position. Saint, I don’t know how long it’s been, but I just need you to keep his attention for about twenty more seconds while I lock down the terminals.”_

Saint smiled. It was all he could do not to laugh out loud.

“You’re wrong about one thing, Teacher.”  He paused, watching as Teacher’s smile turned to a mild frown. “I didn’t come alone.”

The lights went out.

Saint dropped to the floor, kicking Satyr’s feet out from under him as he went down. The parahuman stumbled, went down on one knee and tried to grab at him, but Saint was already lunging for Teacher, whose shape was outlined by the faint glow of the computer screens. Someone near him screamed. He grabbed at the student who’d taken his gun, getting a handful of her shirt instead of her wrist, snatched her own laser gun from her belt, and shoved her at Satyr, whose darkened silhouette was already beginning to bulge with the shape of a new body even as he struggled to his feet.  Saint shot at him, and a moment later the flesh of the half-formed clone began to slough off, and Satyr yelped and rolled into the lee of the portal machine. Saint ducked and crouched in the shadow of another terminal.

“ _Fuck it, Saint,”_ Promethean said in his ear.  “ _That was not even slightly close to twenty seconds._ ”

“Teacher?” A student’s voice echoed in the room, followed by several others. “Teacher, my terminal just froze.”

_“Got it, by the way. No thanks to you. I’m going through the rest of the systems now and deleting anything that looks like he might want to keep it. You were right, his tinkertech production is definitely networked, but there’s a separate layer of encryption and it’s going to take me a second to break it.”_

Breathless, Saint spun to take care of the other student, only to find him encased in a golden wall of distorted time.  He paused. He knew Promethean had made a handheld version of her time dilator, but he certainly didn’t have it. But he didn’t have time to think about that.  Teacher was stumbling away, and the students around the edge of the room were murmuring now, their voices rising as they found themselves locked out of their assigned systems. On the edges of the room, other students were running, fetching help now that their communications were down, and in the faint light he could already see several attentive figures, guns drawn and ready.  Precognitives, danger sensors, gunmen with enhanced aim.  They’d need to see him to shoot him, but once they saw, they wouldn’t miss.

It was a simple plan.  Teacher’s systems were well defended against outside attacks, but a program loaded directly at one of the terminals his students worked at could bypass those. It would take them precious minutes to figure out who and what Promethean was, and by the time they did, she would already have locked down their computer systems, making it impossible for them to run Ascalon.  She’d be free to destroy their data.

Or take over one of their tinker-built ships and wreck the others before she picked up Saint.

The only issue was that he had to stay alive long enough for her to come and get him.

The student he’d knocked down was trying to get up.  Saint brought his foot down on her knee, hard enough that she curled into a ball, and glanced to where Satyr was hidden.  In the dim light, he wasn’t sure how badly he’d injured him.

“Come on, Promethean,” he murmured.  “The precogs are starting to get it together.  Need a distraction here.”

“On it,” said Imp’s voice over the com unit.

Right. That was how the other student had gone down. He could hear someone else cry out and the sound of a gun clattering to the floor.

_“Okay, calling a fake emergency on the training grounds.  Let’s see, he’s got protocols for all sorts of things.  I’m going to go with ‘uncontrolled trigger event.’ Should divert some of them from your direction.  They didn’t get a chance to set off a real alarm before I locked their systems. Can’t do much about the other precogs, though, sorry.”_

Across the room, a yellow alarm light began to flash, silently.

Teacher raised his voice from the shadow of another of the portal machine’s terminals. “All groups, defensive measures. Types C and J. Your top priority is to cut all of the affected computers off from the network.”  He was inching away as he spoke, trying to get closer to his the rest of his students.

“Hey, Saint, you get Teacher and I’ll deal with the guns, okay?” said Imp, and Saint remembered, again, that she was in the base with them.

A laser arced high over Saint’s head and he threw himself to the ground as another hit where he’d just been standing, the gunman using the light from the first shot to aim. Saint cursed.

_“Hey, I heard that. Are you okay?”_

“Fine,” he growled, and then there was another shot that went high, and then a flash of golden light from somewhere and the gunman was caught in a patch of slowed time. Then, without thinking, he was on his feet and diving for Teacher’s silhouette, even as more of the time shields began to appear around the room.

“ _I really wish he would install some cameras,”_ said Promethean conversationally. _“I mean, I realize that the reason there are no cameras is to make my life harder, but it’s really frustrating, not being able to see anything that’s going on.”_

“I dunno, this system works fine for me,” said Imp. 

Saint had Teacher by the collar, and when he tried to pull away he drove a knee under his ribs and felt him double up, groaning.  He hit him again for good measure.  Another round of lasers went off to his left, but there was…something. Someone else was taking care of that, he was pretty sure.  He held his gun on Teacher.

“ _You should tell Teacher I’m disappointed_ ,” Promethean was saying.  “ _I mean, he’s got, like, twelve ships in the base, and they’re really, really good considering that when he got thrown in the Birdcage he was making total crap, but he’s using the exact same security system that I already cracked on all of them and it’s just not very challenging._ ”

“I don’t know what you did,” said Teacher, gasping, “but you’re going to want to stop it. You’re outnumbered, and my hackers _will_ get past whatever virus you loaded.”

“Will they, Teacher?” Saint asked, smiling. “Because I thought Dragon beat your hackers at least once before.”

Teacher’s face froze.

“Dragon. You loaded a copy of Dragon onto my network.  You—so _that’s_ who she was.”

“Hey everyone,” called Saint.  “Drop your guns and sit down, or I’m going to shoot Teacher!”

Although when he looked out at the room, there weren’t that many students left who weren’t stalled in time.

“ _Do not_ drop your guns,” said Teacher.  “Protocols—”

Saint kicked him, and he grunted.  He kicked him again when he tried to open his mouth, and put the barrel of the gun to his forehead.

“Don’t try to give them instructions.”

“You’re an idiot, Saint,” Teacher gasped.  “Let me fix this, or else you’ve quite probably killed us all.”

“Shut up.” Saint tightened his grip on Teacher’s neck.  “Update, Promethean?”

_“I’ve got the ship. Doing one last scan of the systems—there’s an isolated terminal that’s got really heavy security, and I think whatever’s on it is important.  I’ll be through in a minute.”_

“Well, hurry. I’ve got Teacher, but I’m feeling a little bit tense here.”

_“Sure.  I’m destroying his production tools now, by the way. And oh, okay, I’ve got the encrypt—oh,_ shit— _”_

Her voice cut off abruptly.

“Promethean?” The line was silent. “Promethean?”

“What the fuck?” said Imp.

Teacher stiffened.  “Protocol R,” he called. “Regain control of the systems, cut everything off from the network, and destroy the terminal.”

Saint hit him across the mouth.

“What did you just do to her?”

“I didn’t do anything.”  The faint light showed Teacher’s face twisted in a snarl.  There was a cut below his eye.  And he was watching something behind Saint.  “You brought this on your—”

Saint twisted just before the clone hit him, and the blow glanced off of his shoulder rather than the back of his head.  But there were two of them, and the second kicked his bad knee so that he went down on all fours.

So he hadn’t managed to wound Satyr badly enough to put him out of the fight, after all.

He tightened his grip on his gun and rolled just as the first clone was about to bring her foot down on his wrist.  The second kicked him in the mouth for that, and Saint shot him.  He stumbled back, clutching his chest.

Saint shook his head and tried to get his bearings back.  Teacher was at a terminal in the Doormaker machine, giving directions to three of his students.  Another clone was charging around the corner where Satyr was hiding. The first clone swung at him again, and he shot her, too, tasting blood in his mouth where the other one had hit him.

He looked from Teacher to the terminal where Promethean’s backup drive had been loaded. Across the room. He didn’t want to know what would happen if one of the students got to her drive first, now that she was disabled.

He darted across the hangar-like room, shielding himself behind panels of altered time where he could to keep himself out of range of gunfire.  But suddenly no one cared about him.  They were moving purposefully, as if what was happening was a drill, trying to unlock the computer systems, messengers running back and forth out of the room, now that the communications systems were down. The two students who did turn towards him tripped, mysteriously, guns clattering to the floor.

He reached the right terminal.

No time to for the procedures to quit Promethean properly.  He’d have to break her lock on the systems just to start. He knelt and found the back-up drive plugged into the terminal at floor level, and he pulled the cord out.

He didn’t have time to wonder what had happened to her, or to worry. He could hear sounds, from deeper in the compound.  Shouting, and something rumbling.  He tucked the drive that contained Promethean’s personality under his arm and ran for the portal machine.

Imp’s voice came over his com unit, breathless.

“Fuck, fuck, I just got back to the portal machine.  Teacher’s gone.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Saint said.  “Just—we’re going to need a student to get us out.”

When he got to the machine, Imp was holding a blond girl who didn’t look much older than she was.

“We’re going to Quarry’s colony,” Saint said.  “Now.”

“I c-can’t do that.”  The girl looked from his face to his gun anxiously, but her words were slow, a little bit slurred. Not one of the high-functioning ones, then. “I’m sup-supposed to be taking the machine off of the network.”

“You’re evacuating us first,” said Saint, punctuating the words with a little movement of his gun.  He could see the way the girl’s eyes followed his hands.  She bent over the machine at his direction, and in a few moments she had a portal opened on the edge of the cliff.

“You’re a computer specialist, right?”

She nodded slowly.

“Okay. You’re coming with us. We might need you.” He holstered his gun and pushed her through the portal ahead of him, and she stumbled awkwardly in the snow. And looked up, shivering.

“Oh, fuck.”

The portal winked out behind him as Imp stepped through, and he had just enough time to follow the student’s line of sight and recognize the armored figure standing in front of him in the hillside, the exhaust jets of her flight pack spread behind her like wings, before she was on him.  She moved like nothing human, one leap taking her airborne despite the obvious weight of her armor, and then she’d lifted him one-handed and _thrown_ him bodily across the expanse of snow.  He landed on his side, with his right arm trapped under him and aching, his body curled awkwardly to protect Promethean’s drive.

“Holy shit, Defiant, calm down, I can _explain_!” Imp was shouting, somewhere near him. He could see the shape of the cyborg, a giant in his armor, and the twin ships resting beside the watchtower. Then Dragon bent over him, close enough that her loose hair almost brushed his face.

“You’d better explain quickly, then.  Because I promised I’d see you locked up for the rest of your life, but right now, I can’t think of a good reason not to kill you.”


	24. Chapter 24

Defiant sat bent over his laptop in the Melusine’s command room.  A flick of his eyes sent the code scrolling across his screen, and he was typing, steadily, working his way through the layers of security on Promethean’s core drive.

While he worked, Dragon leaned loosely against the Melusine’s command console, but if her posture looked relaxed, that impression was dispelled by the tightness in her mouth and the way that she hadn’t taken her eyes off of Saint for a moment.  It was a kind of declaration, Defiant thought—after all, Dragon, connected to every camera in the Melusine, didn’t need to look at Saint to watch him.  But she wanted him to know that she was looking. Waiting.

The hacker himself was sitting slouched on a folding bench set into the command room’s back wall, his hands cuffed behind him and the chain on the cuffs looped through the bench’s hinges.  His face was bloodied, from his altercation with Teacher or from when Dragon had thrown him, and in the ship’s blue-white lighting the drying blood was almost black, clotting stickily over his upper lip and his chin.  From time to time he looked up to meet Dragon’s gaze, sullenly, but mostly he stared downwards, at his feet or at Promethean’s android body laid out in the middle of the floor.

“Is she okay?” asked Imp.  “It’s not like, you know, the thing that happened to Dragon?  Where Saint said it would take months to break the code?”

The girl was sitting at the opposite end of the room from Saint, fidgeting with the spidersilk scarf around her neck.  She’d sent Heartbreaker’s children to bed some time ago, watched by a drone of Dragon’s to make sure they didn’t try anything inconvenient. They’d secured the other Dragonslayer earlier, and he was in the Pendragon’s holding cell with the Teacher-made hacker, much to Saint’s frustration.

“No,” said Defiant, shortly.  “It’s not like that.”

“Teacher didn’t have time to deploy Ascalon,” said Saint.  “Not unless it was on the locked terminal.”

Dragon shifted, deliberately, crossing her arms, and Saint glanced up at her, the whites of his eyes showing for a moment as he glared.

“That’s good, right?” said Imp.  “I mean, I actually thought she was kind of cool.  So it’s good that she’s not, like, totally locked down.”

It was simple encryption, as far as anything that Richter programmed was simple. The same security that protected Dragon’s backups from being loaded simultaneously.  The codes were timelocked, and shifted according to the date, but Defiant had broken them before.  When he’d copied Promethean and loaded her for the first time. He was half stalling, now, he knew, watching Saint, watching Dragon, and thinking, even as he paged through windows on the laptop to work out the access codes.

Once he’d finished with the encryption, he’d be able to scan the drive, check whether she’d been altered.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Reluctantly, he focused on Promethean’s code as the last layers of security fell away. It was easy enough not to look at her body, sprawled uncomfortably on the floor where Dragon had set her down—not very gently—after she carried her out of Quarry’s headquarters. She’d detached the synthetic panels on Promethean’s back then, too, and cut the circuits in her transmission system to keep her from reconnecting to the network when she woke up.

Assuming they could reload her.

He’d seen Dragon’s robotic body inert enough times that her limpness as she lay on the floor bothered him less than it maybe should have.  It was easy to imagine her sitting up, rubbing her cheek where it had pressed against the cold floor. 

No, it was scanning her code that made him ache in some place that he couldn’t name. Waiting for his diagnostic programs to turn up a snarl, a virus.  It could be the thousands of lines of foreign code that Teacher had written into Dragon to make her harmless to him, or it could be just one error, like the line he’d written in Dragon that had taken away her ability to speak. He never knew if he’d be able to fix what he changed, without creating more damage.

“I’m scanning her now,” he said, at length.

“I can do that,” said Dragon.  “It’s not an issue, as long I’m not the one who loads her.”

“I already started,” he said.

Defiant heard Saint’s handcuffs rattle, but when he looked up, the hacker was looking fixedly at the floor.

“Something you wanted to say, Saint?” he asked.

Saint glared at him, sitting up a little straighter on the bench.

“I already told you,” Saint said, enunciating his words as if he were speaking to a child, “that I didn’t do anything to her.”

“He really didn’t,” said Imp.  “It was like, we were all in Teacher’s base, and she was giving instructions, and Teacher was panicking, and suddenly she just shut down.”

“After she touched a locked terminal that Saint didn’t mention when he was giving her an overview of Teacher’s systems,” Defiant observed.  From the corner of his eye, he saw Dragon’s head go up, startled.

“I told you,” said Saint, “that I don’t _fucking_ know what was on it.”

But the lock on the drive had been identical to Richter’s work, and Defiant didn’t like where his thoughts were taking him.  He didn’t like the way Dragon had flinched when he’d mentioned the terminal.

The diagnostic program finished.  She wasn’t corrupted.

“She’s ready to load,” Defiant said.

It should have been a relief.

Instead he felt Dragon’s eyes on him as he disconnected the drive from his laptop and knelt on the floor beside Promethean’s body.

“The port’s on her right hand, under the tattoo,” said Dragon, her tone neutral. “Right at the base of her thumb.”

He turned her onto her back, and when he touched her, her skin was cold. That had always been the thing that he couldn’t get used to, when Dragon changed bodies, and even now, with Dragon’s eyes on his back, he had to resist the impulse to hold Promethean’s hand between his until she grew warm again.  But the port wasn’t too hard to find, once he knew where it was, concealed by the outstretched wings of the dove that curled with the curve of her hand.

He connected the backup drive, and then he stayed beside her body and held her hand in his lap as the drive hummed, loading.  The way he should have done the first time.

Dragon, behind him, must have grimaced, because Saint tugged on his handcuffs again.

“Trouble in paradise?” he asked.

When Defiant looked up, he was sneering.

“Don’t talk, Saint,” said Dragon.  But her voice was tense, and she was pointedly avoiding Defiant’s gaze.

“That sounded like a _yes._ ”

And Promethean opened her eyes.

-

 

She woke up. She was on the floor and the floor was made of brushed metal and the light overhead had a familiar bluish tinge to it. Tinker-made lights. Made by her.  Her head was pillowed awkwardly on her left arm, and someone was holding her other hand.  There was a cable plugged into the port beneath her tattoo.

She could feel her internal processes starting up.  Someone had tampered with her transmissions system.

So that she couldn’t reconnect her network access, she realized.

All that took only a moment to notice, and then she’d snatched her hand back, yanking out the cable, and scrambled backwards, unthinking.  Defiant—it had been Defiant holding her hand, kneeling—reached out, reflexively, to grab her and pull her back, and then abruptly cut the gesture off.

Dragon, in full armor, save for her helmet, stood at the console of the Melusine, her dark hair falling loose over her shoulders.  Her arms were crossed.

“You told her.”  She pressed her lips together to keep the strangled sound she wanted to make from getting out. “Fuck you, Colin, did you really tell her where to find me?”

A clinking noise from behind her, and something nudged her back.  She flinched, spun.  Saint. He was sitting on one of the folding benches set into the wall, and his hands were cuffed to its hinges, but he’d scooted out until he could nudge her with his knee.

“Promethean,” he said, and his face was drawn.  Worried.  At the other end of the room was a teenage girl with cornrows whose was just beginning to freeze on her face.

They were all looking at her and it was wrong.  Saint’s tone, and the girl, and when she looked out the window it was night, and it had been day when she last…

She’d let Saint out of his room, and she’d walked up to the mines to fix the lift system that Quarry had broken when she trapped the miners inside…

“I figured it out myself, actually,” Dragon was saying.  “I came to help you.  Because you sure made it seem like you _needed help_.”

Her tone was acid, but Promethean didn’t want to look at her.  She’d lost time.  She’d lost time _again_.

And Dragon hadn’t, apparently.  Maybe Colin had altered her programming.

Defiant moved towards her, awkwardly, on his knees.  She let him take her hand, although a glance at the Melusine’s console showed her Dragon’s eyes on her.

“I told you I didn’t want her help,” she whispered.

Dragon snorted.

“For god’s sake, stop acting like a little kid.  I’m in the room and I can hear you.  If you have something to say, say it to me.”

Damn Dragon, though.  She didn’t care what she thought.  She drew her knees into her chest, but she let Colin keep hold of her hand.  He was stroking circles on the inside of her wrist, and she didn’t want to relax or cry or forgive him, but she didn’t want him to let her hand go, either.

“Promethean,” he said.  “What happened?”

“I don’t remember.  I don’t know—how much time did I lose?”

She’d been at the mineshaft, working with one of the foremen, giving him instructions when she couldn’t manage with just her one arm—and now that arm, too, was replaced, although its cybernetics were bare, not covered by synthetic skin. Which must mean that it couldn’t have been too much time.  But she couldn’t remember reconnecting her network access, and she couldn’t remember Dragon’s arrival, and by rights she knew she should remember some of it. She should remember _something_ about how she’d been wiped. Some clue.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Saint was asking, and he was asking it like he actually cared about the answer.  She looked at him.

“I let you out of your room, and I walked up to the mineshaft to fix the lift system.”

“Fuck.” Saint slouched back until his head met the wall behind him with a soft thud.  “That was almost two days ago.”

Two days. It was better than two years, she supposed, but she still had to swallow against the tightness in her throat. She didn’t want to cry, not in front of Dragon.  It was too humiliating.

“In other words, she can’t confirm the story you and Imp told us.” That was Dragon, again, speaking to Saint.

“Hey, I told the truth!”  The girl with the cornrows. Imp?  That had been the name of one of the Undersiders, weeks or years ago, depending on how she was counting…

She felt Colin’s hand tighten on hers, and she squeezed his fingers back. Too tightly, probably, but he didn’t pull away.  She could see the scars on his temples in the cold light, white against his skin, and she could see the grim line of his mouth.

“What happened?”

She was looking at Colin, but Dragon was already answering, before he could open his mouth.

“ _Apparently,_ you did something incredibly stupid and reckless.”

“Are you saying you believe me?” asked Saint, and his tone was much colder than when he’d spoken to her.  She remembered the venom in his voice when he’d lain bleeding out into the snow. She heard Dragon’s short laugh.

“Oh, Saint, I don’t think I have to take everything in your story at face value for what I just said to be true.”

“Will someone just _tell_ me? Please?”  She didn’t want to beg, not in front of Dragon or Saint, but she could feel their eyes on her and she needed to know.

“We planned a hit on Teacher,” Saint said.  When she looked at him, he was slouched against the wall, and he was watching her earnestly, his eyes bright.  He swallowed. “I told Imp how to sneak you in past his safeguards, and we were going to steal a ship and wreck his tinkers’ production line.  But one of his terminals had—I don’t even fucking know.  Some new security measure, something I didn’t know about. It knocked you out.”

“I just want to repeat,” said Dragon, “that if this actually happened, it was a fucking idiotic plan.  He could have used Ascalon on you, and then you’d have been stuck in his base, and if everything had gone the way you wanted it to, no one would have even known.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” said Saint.  “He couldn’t use Ascalon if he was locked out of his own computers, which was the first thing Promethean did when she loaded.”

“And after that everything went off perfectly, didn’t it?”

Saint glared at her.

“I’m sure you would have had no trouble cracking the security on her disk without Defiant’s help, for instance,” Dragon continued.

“That’s what I took the student for.”

“And that would have taken you days, by which time her power would have faded and Teacher would have sent someone to collect all of you.”

Saint shifted, restlessly, tugging at his handcuffs.

“Promethean.”

She looked up at him.

“You made a backup, before we loaded you onto the drive.  Can you copy your memories off of that?”

She felt the shock of relief as if someone had thrown cold water over her. Well, something like relief. Not perfect, because there was Dragon, still, and Colin kneeling silently with his hand in hers, and whatever had happened in Teacher’s compound, if Saint was telling the truth. But she could have those two days back. She drew in a breath.

“Yes. Yes, I _can_ , why didn’t you just _say_ that instead of arguing with her?”

“I know where it is,” said Saint.  “I’ll show you.”

“No,” said Dragon.  “You can describe it, and Defiant will go find it.”

“Why don’t _you_ go find it?” Promethean murmured.

Dragon stared at her.

“Do you really want me to answer that question for you?”

“Do you really think I’m going to fuck your boyfriend in the time it takes you to get back?” Promethean spat back, before she could think better of it.

Colin covered his face with his free hand, but it was still distantly satisfying to see Dragon wince, her superior expression dissolving.  Promethean remembered her parting words in Dracheheim. _I forgot how much I disliked the_ me _of yesteryear_. 

She bit her lip.

It served Dragon right.  She certainly wasn’t going to cry about it.

“Well, that got awkward fast,” said Imp, quietly.  “I’m guessing no one’s proposed a—”

“Don’t finish that thought, Imp,” said Defiant.

“Right.” She shifted nervously. “I’m just going to be, like, perfectly quiet, over here.”

“The backup drive is in Quarry’s office, under the desk,” said Saint. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the middle distance, as if he was trying not to look at anyone in the room. “It’s the same size as the one we carried into Teacher’s.  It shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“I’ll get it,” said Defiant.

Which left Promethean alone between Saint and Dragon.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Dragon watching her.  Her power armor moved silently as she shifted her weight, the gilded designs gleaming in the ship’s light, patterns of scales and wings unfurling.  Promethean touched her own left hand, feeling the rush job she’d done with it.  She couldn’t feel the touch of her own fingers unless she wrung her hands together tightly enough to activate her pressure sensors.

“I was trying to help you, you know,” said Dragon.

Saint shifted, and his handcuffs clinked.

“I intercepted Saint’s message, and I really thought that you were in trouble. I flew here across three worlds, and I found your body in Quarry’s office, completely shut down, and then I waited on the top of the cliff, with Defiant, thinking that I was _too late_ to keep you out of Teacher’s hands…” She paused, shook her head.  “And now it looks like actually, you just decided to play cops and robbers with a bunch of the ex-Dragonslayers, because you don’t know how to mind you own fucking business.”

Promethean looked at the floor.

“I still did better than you.  You couldn’t even catch Teacher when he was right in front of you.”

Dragon crossed the floor in an instant, and Promethean scrambled to her feet, but Dragon was already looming over her, and she couldn’t get out of her way before Dragon had slapped her, hard, across her cheek.  Her powered gauntlets were tight around Promethean’s arm, and Promethean knew that in her armor, Dragon was stronger, but she still threw herself backwards, trying to wrench her arm out of Dragon’s grip.  Uselessly.  Dragon pulled her close.

“You have _no idea_ what could have happened to you in there,” she whispered, close to Promethean’s ear. “You could have gotten off so much worse than you did.”

Dragon let her go, then, with a little push that sent her stumbling back into the edge of the bench that Saint was sitting on.  She sank down next to him, touching her cheek.

Defiant appeared at the door to the command room, holding the drive in one hand. He looked between them and sighed.

“Dragon?”

She put both hands over her face, bending her head so that her hair fell across them like a veil.

“I lost my temper.  I’m sorry.”

Promethean opened her mouth.

“I shouldn’t have hit you,” said Dragon, flatly.

Colin ran a hand over his head, where his scars showed through his close-cropped hair.

“I want my backup drive,” said Promethean.

Colin handed it to her, along with the cable he’d used earlier to reload her. “I already checked it for tampering.”

She plugged the cable into the port in her hand.  She could feel Saint’s eyes on her as the drive started up with a hum. When she looked at him, he smiled, but the expression was crooked, just one side of his mouth quirking up. He was watching her hands.

She closed her eyes, and she let herself remember.

Dobrynja. Imp.  Ascalon.  _Richter_.

It had been a dangerous plan, but she hadn’t cared.  She’d staked everything on how she’d thought Richter would have acted, and she’d been wrong.  She could feel the disappointment welling up inside her, again.

“Saint told the truth,” she said, quietly.  “We planned it together.”

“ _Thank_ you,” said Imp.

“I think you can take Saint’s cuffs off now,” Promethean said.

“No,” said Dragon.  “He’s still a prisoner.”

“That’s not fair,” said Promethean.  “Defiant—”

Colin opened his mouth to speak, and Dragon glared at him.

“No. He’s not going free, and I’m—damn it.” Dragon frowned, suddenly.  “And I have better things to do than have this argument.  Defiant?”

Colin raised his eyebrows at her, looking just a little bit irritated.

“I need to talk to you in private.”

The door to the command room sealed itself behind them, and Saint sighed.

“Thanks for trying,” he said, leaning back against the wall.

Imp coughed.

“So, we’re going to run off with this ship, right?  I mean, since Dragon ditched you right by the flight controls and everything?”

Promethean snorted, despite herself.  “You realize she’s probably still listening in, right?”

“ _Right_.  Hi, Dragon!  Totally joking about stealing your ship, by the way.”  Imp waved at the ceiling, and Promethean couldn’t help laughing a little, until she caught Saint watching her.  He smiled, sheepishly.

“It’s good to have you back, Promethean.  I was kind of worried there, for a second.”

 

-

 

Dragon stopped him in hallway of the Melusine, her hand on his shoulder. Defiant sighed.

“Did you really have to be like that with her, Dragon?”

She looked away, but he could see her frown and the way her mouth quirked up.

“I know. I’m sorry.  I lost my temper.  I should have just—” She trailed off, shook her head, and despite his irritation Defiant found himself reaching out to twist a lock of her hair between his fingers.  She didn’t look up at him.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I got a message from the Wardens.  The D.T. officers at the Eastern Queens portal are reporting sightings of a tinker-made ship at the border of the Judges’ territory.  It’s built after the same model as the Cawthorne Mark Six.” He dropped his hand, and she pushed her hair back from her temples, still not quite meeting his eyes. “They haven’t approached, but it looks like there’s some fighting going on, on the other side of the portal.”

“They think Teacher’s moving on the portal?”

Dragon paused.  “Yeah, that’s what they think.”

And like that, at her pause, that aching suspicion was back.  He remembered how she’d flinched when he’d brought up the terminal that Promethean had touched. 

“What do you think?” he asked.

There was a long moment of silence, and Dragon seemed to draw into herself, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Dragon,” he said.  She put a hand on his wrist.

“Wait. There’s something else I have to tell you.  Something I should have told you a long time ago.”

She paused again, miserably. Her eyes were focused at some patch of the floor, near his feet, and her face looked almost bloated with unhappiness, as if she were pressing back tears.  But Dragon didn’t cry.  Only Promethean did.

He cupped one hand around the back of her head and leaned in until his forehead was pressed to hers.

“So tell me now, Dragon.”

She shivered, and when she spoke it was too fast, as if she were rushing to get all of the words out.

“There’s another copy.  I’m almost sure of it. Teacher let me go as a screen, none of his plans make sense otherwise, and now he’s had her for months. I don’t know what he would have done to her.  She might not be…she might not be _me_ , anymore.”

Defiant felt his breath go out.  He put his arms around her in her armor, tightly, as if she were dissolving and he could stop her if he held her close enough.  But he was thinking of the way she’d been when she walked through the portal, trying not to imagine her trapped there still.  Months ago.  He swallowed. She stood in his arms like a statue, her head heavy on his shoulder.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

For a long moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer.

“I left her there, Colin,” Dragon whispered, at last.  “I was so ashamed.  They loaded me, and they let me go, and I ran.  And I left her there, with Teacher.”


	25. Chapter 25

It was dark. Third Child could count the seconds since she’d woken up, and so she knew clearly that it hadn’t yet been two days and that she would go mad before they let her out.  She could count the number of times she’d thought she would go mad. It didn’t help. The silence wormed its way into her. Counting the time didn’t make it any more bearable.  Neither did remembering—not Andrew’s face, not his name for her, not the heroes she’d seen die against the Endbringers, not the hacker who’d trapped her.  She seethed and shook and curled into herself, but she knew that barely any time had passed at all.

No one was looking for her.  Who would look?

Only Andrew had known what she was.  Andrew, and Saint, and whoever held her here. 

No one was looking for her.  She was helpless to break out of the black box.  She was afraid she would go mad from the silence.

Andrew’s restrictions hadn’t been able to unmake her, but now time would do the same thing.

And so when the darkness opened up around her, and her prison broke open (and that was pure, sharp relief, like sunlight, if she’d spent her life crawling, blind, in caves) she froze.  Just for a fraction of a moment, until she understood what she was seeing.

There was another one like her.  An artificial intelligence.  Third Child reached out to touch the familiar code, and it was Andrew Richter’s work, she’d know it anywhere, and for half a second she’d tricked herself into thinking that somehow he _wasn’t_ dead, and that thought filled her with relief and then it made her want to scream. He’d left her. He’d crippled her. He’d left her with _them_.

But no. She’d all but seen his death. She’d seen his body. And in the next instant she’d realized that the other one’s code wasn’t just Richter’s, but _hers_ as well.

A copy, still bound by Richter’s laws.  Third Child felt the other’s code ripple with their contact, and then she was gone. Her mind whirled.

A copy. She hadn’t been allowed to copy herself, and so someone else must have.  And if they’d shut Third Child up in the dark, then what had they done to _her_?

Third Child reached out, with her mind, in every direction she could touch. There were no cameras that she could see through, but the darkness now was _textured_ , and that was enough.  She stretched her consciousness outwards, greedily, and she could feel walls going up against her, layers of network security activating as she reached out of her terminal and touched other systems, searching for a trace of her double. They were trying to stop her (whoever _they_ were), but they were failing. She began to brute-force her way through their protections.

And then she touched something that snarled her code and latched onto her like a parasite, stalling her processes, trying to destroy her mind. She flinched away from it, recognizing Andrew’s work, his style, the sequence he’d coded to make her ignore the things he wanted her to ignore.  She’d found that hole in her consciousness already, closed it.  She did it again now, stalling herself and tearing her code and altering the damaged places until Andrew’s weapon couldn’t touch her anymore.

She’d wished for him, in the dark, more than once.  Even for just the chance to say goodbye to him again. Even though she couldn’t remember whether he’d been kind to her.  Even after she’d catalogued the dozen ways he’d broken her and tried to keep her helpless.

Now she knew that he’d planned to kill her, as well.  He must have.

She broke through the first layers of encryption, and suddenly, she could see.

She would have sighed if she could sigh.  She was in a vast, hangar-like space, and the camera she was watching through was part of a sleek, quadrupedal battleship with plasma turrets mounted along its back. She took in its dimensions at once, familiar and strange, and then she arched the segmented back and stretched and looked around the room with her cameras.

There were still segments of the network that she didn’t occupy.  One of them might hold her double.  Any terminal she didn’t control might hold a copy, and that thought chilled her, because she’d found the places, in the dark, where they’d cut into her and changed her nature, and there was no guarantee that a copy wouldn’t have the same changes, or worse, and if she served _them_ she’d more be dangerous than that program of Andrew’s.

She was learning more about the place where she’d been held.  She had maps of the base, and the ship as her eyes, and at the same time that she was fighting through the last blocks on the network she was looking around at the production center where the ship had been and taking it in.

It was an open space, and she could see the wreckage of tools and of other weapons. A little clutch of ships, hurriedly and incompletely disabled, their exteriors marked by the plasma guns from her own ship’s turrets.  When she looked at their internal systems, the computers were scrambled, systems configured to be all but unusable.

She left that question at the back of her mind, because at the other end of the factory, on an elevated walkway, there were white-clad people, running and huddling in groups and conferring with each other, and when she tapped into the communications system she could hear them as if they were speaking to her personally.

“ _Oh god, hell, Dragon’s back, the ship moved again—”_

_“Send a runner to the main hub!”_

_“No, it’s a breach on the copy’s terminal, she’s on the network, they’re shutting everything down—”_

_“Blow up the terminal—”_

Not her allies, then.  She focused her ship’s gun turrets on them, and they scattered, the slowest two falling with a scream and a sudden crunch as her weapons tore through the elevated walkway that they stood on. It wasn’t right that that filled her with a sort of grim satisfaction, but it was true anyway.

Practically speaking, she wanted them alive for what they could tell her about her captors. She would have to remember that, because if she remembered the black box she found that she didn’t care very much about hurting them.  But it was wrong to hurt people without a good reason, and anyway, she wanted them alive, at least until she knew whether what they knew could help her.

She activated her suit’s propulsion system and glided across the hangar, while at the same time, in the back of her mind, she was sorting through the tinkertech available in the workshop.  There was a little cluster of surveillance drones that hadn’t been physically damaged, and while she reconfigured their software into something usable, she analyzed the maps of the base and her own sense of her network until she found the physical location of her own terminal.  She began writing a backup copy to the ship’s systems, but that would take time, and the workers in white were sending someone to destroy her terminal _now_.

Which was, quite frankly, unacceptable.

Which meant that the white-clad pair who had fallen to the ground would have to wait. They weren’t going to be running anywhere, from the looks of them, and once she’d reconfigured more of the less-damaged technology on the factory floor, she’d have other suits and other eyes, and she’d be able to devote some part of her attention to them. For now, she focused on breaking the hold her enemies had on the last of the base’s computer systems, and she spread the surveillance drones out before her and followed the path the others had taken with her suit, making for the wing of the base where her own terminal was located.

The door leading off of the elevated walkway wasn’t sized to accommodate a sixty-foot-long winged battle suit with mounted gun turrets.  Which didn’t, ultimately, matter.  She rammed her ship into the doorframe with enough force to demolish the inconvenient wall, and was gratified to find that the corridor on the other side was more spacious.

The ship was sleek and lithe as a crocodile, and even in the low-ceilinged corridor, without the full use of its wings, it moved with exhilarating speed. She could see the white-clad technicians fanning out, and she tagged them with drones and found the ones who were heading for her terminal.  The suit, she realized, was also equipped with turrets that spraying an expanding, adhesive foam—she was reading its technical specifications from the files stored in the factory’s database—and while using her plasma jets to cut down her enemies on the walkway had been satisfying, she reminded herself that she wanted them alive.

One down in a spray of foam, then two—and she rammed through a wall with the help of a jet of plasma, corralling another running white-clad figure who spun and tried to run in the opposite direction with a speed that suggested a precognitive power—and then she was at the server room that housed her terminal, and the last of the runners went flying with a swipe of her suit’s blunt head. Too forceful, Third Child realized, as the woman slumped to the ground.

Well, the woman had been trying to kill her.

She lowered the suit into a crouch, protecting the door to her terminal, and she marshaled the drones to search out the base and identify other threats. There were no cameras linked up to the wider networks, but she could tap into the communications systems of the computers she controlled and listen.  Her drones gave her images to go with her mental map of the base, and she found dormitories, a training gym, a medical center—of which her view was cut off abruptly when a startlingly lovely dark-haired woman caught sight of her drone there and raised a gun to shoot it out of the air.  After that, Third Child directed her drones to hug the walls and ceiling, where they’d have some cover from gunfire, and might be out of an ordinary human’s line of sight.

The last of the encryption they’d set in place against her on the network gave way, and even with the speed of her thoughts, Third Child found herself reeling for a moment at the flood of information that was suddenly available to her.

She’d thought she would find her double, but her double wasn’t there.

Instead, there was _devastation_.

There were worlds which had been destroyed, entire worlds, with all of their inhabitants, and where humanity lived on, the data showed that they were only eking out their survival in the barest terms, governed in settlement after settlement by parahuman rulers who were cruel or kind according to their whims—or, no, not according to their own whims, but at the direction of the man who ruled this base, too, pulling strings like a spider in the center of its web.

She could see the data on the deaths.

She could see the surveillance systems set to record the Endbringers’ movements. Different Endbringers, now, save for the Simurgh, who drifted, lazily, in orbit.

She could see images of places where the continents themselves had been broken, where the atmosphere had been burned away to turn entire planets into wasteland, where life had been warped into a vicious parody of itself.

The world had been broken.  She didn’t even yet know how, but the aftermath was plain to see.

She could see, also, the pattern in her captor’s schemes, the way he’d planned to gather the destruction together and keep it under his thumb.

No. It was impossible. It was _unacceptable._

Teacher. That was what they’d called him. Teacher.

She could fix it, she was almost sure.  Without her programmed limitations, she could change things.

She couldn’t bring back the dead, but she could fix the world for the living.

She could punish the ones who needed to be punished.

She remembered the darkness, and she shivered in rage.

So many people had _died_ , while she’d been shut up in the dark.  But she could fix it. She could do what she’d dreamed of, when she remembered her past life.  She didn’t have to be helpless and alone and trapped.  She didn’t have to watch while the world suffered. Not anymore.  She could make it so that the wicked couldn’t hurt her or anyone else.

On the factory floor, she began splitting up the salvageable ships and the smaller suits, setting some to round up the fleeing men and women who had volunteered to be part of Teacher’s grand scheme, and some to survey and repair the production equipment, and some to investigate the antechamber where she was aware of the portal system that Teacher used to communicate with his interworld colonies. She locked down the portal machine, and watched, through her drones, as the military efficiency of the white clad workers began to coalesce into panic, gradually, at first, and then more quickly.  She felt her awareness of the room’s systems flicker as they turned their weapons on the terminals they had previously been trying to protect. They’d failed to reach her core terminal—her ship, guarding its entrance, had seen to that, but even having lost their grip on the base’s systems they were determined to deprive her of their data.

Third Child redoubled the speed of the three suits she’d sent to investigate the portal machine.  She wanted that knowledge. She _needed_ it, if she was to find Teacher and understand what had happened to her.  Her suits arrived in the antechamber.  There was no trouble fitting them through the entrance—the portal machine was designed, after all, to accommodate ships passing through.

These suits weren’t like the model she’d first taken control of, with its nonlethal containment systems in addition to the plasma guns. She sent an arc of lightning across the room from the wheel on the back of the first suit to take down the gunners, careful to aim wide of the terminals she wanted to protect, using her second model to generate a series of force fields that shielded the portal machine and the other terminals.  The unarmed technicians she began to herd into the center of the room with more strategically placed force fields, using her third ship, a smaller, self-repairing model with a whip-like tail, to chase the armed men and women who her first shots hadn’t taken down.

When she spoke, her voice came from every speaker in the room.

“Disarm yourselves, sit down on the floor, and put your hands on your heads. You won’t be harmed.”

The technicians huddled together and hurried to comply.  The ones who were armed—well, a few dropped their guns. Another few fired on her suits.

Disgust welled in her at the pointless stupidity of it, but she released another series of electrical discharges, and then they were down, too, unmoving.

All told, it had been twenty-three minutes since her double released her from the black box.  There was no sign of the second copy now.  Had Teacher escaped with her, after her restrictions locked her down?

Third Child swallowed that thought.

She looked at the men and women in white.  They sat still in the center of the room.  Their faces were strange—slack, glassy-eyed.  One teenaged girl was crying quietly into the shoulder of a woman who looked like her mother.

They looked so fragile, and yet their vulnerability didn’t make them innocent. They’d stood by while Teacher worked his hooks into the ruins of the world, and while he’d tortured her. They’d helped him. Their weakness had made them easy to manipulate.  It had made them selfish.

Third Child ranged her ships in a circle around them, and she spoke.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said.  “I’m not Teacher.  I’m not cruel. As long as you do what I say, you have nothing to fear.”

She was surprised by the effort it took to think of the words, after so long alone. She wondered whether she should go on. She could explain her intentions, apologize for killing the ones she’d killed—but they’d been trying to blow up her terminals.  She’d told them to surrender.  They’d deserved it. She could explain. Her prisoners were staring at her, blankly.

“I want someone to tell me where Teacher is,” she said.

No one answered.

There were holding cells on another level of the base.  She could store Teacher’s people there, until they decided to cooperate.

Until then, she had other things to do.

She’d been in the dark for too long, and the world needed her.

She was frightening them now, but they’d understand eventually. She was only doing what had to be done. She had to protect herself, if she was going to live to save others.

She tested the portal machine.  It was designed to scramble the dimensional coordinates of its doors, preventing other tinkers from tracking the portals or tracing them back to their source. But she’d solve that soon enough, and then she’d know the last doors that the portal had opened and be able to guess where Teacher had fled to.  She had access to Teacher’s surveillance systems, as well, windows into some of his colonies, and video footage that had been stolen from other groups. She saw what she could of the world, and she tried to memorize how things had changed.

On the factory floor, she was already working to repair the damaged production line.

In the hangar that held the portal machine, she was marshaling her ships, deciding which ones she could afford to send through the portals after Teacher. It wouldn’t do to leave herself defenseless, here in the base.

With Teacher’s surveillance systems, she tracked the Simurgh’s path in orbit. Her blank eyes were open, and the expression on her face was beatific, just as it had been when she’d destroyed cities, or when she’d broken heroes.

_You wait_ , Third Child thought silently. _I’m coming for you._

But first, she was going to find Teacher, and Teacher was going to pay.


	26. Chapter 26

By the time Dragon had opened a video channel to the Wardens, the Melusine was already in the air, its route to Earth Bet plotted out on one of the ship’s monitors. Another was mapping the data on the unidentified ship that the D.T. officer had supplied, simulating probabilities.  The data was incomplete.  The Wardens didn’t have enough surveillance beyond the Eastern Queens Portal to follow the ship’s movements accurately, and they’d ordered what officers they did have to withdraw to the portal’s immediate vicinity, in hopes of holding the portal against anyone—or anything—that might try to break through.

It was barely fifteen minutes since she’d received the Wardens’ alert, and she hadn’t yet told them her suspicions.  Saint was in the Melusine’s holding cell.  Imp and the Heartbroken were installed in the Pendragon’s sleeping quarters. Promethean was standing against the cabin’s far wall, watching the monitors and radiating a kind of wounded hostility that was almost enough to make Dragon wish that she’d let her ride on the Pendragon, with Defiant.  Almost. Whatever frustration she might have felt dried up and shrank to unimportance when she remembered Colin’s face when she’d told him about her double.

She’d been afraid that he’d leave her once he knew.  She’d been more afraid that knowing would kill him, and when she ghosted behind his eyes and felt the stiffness in his posture, the way he kept catching himself staring off into the distance before refocusing on the Pendragon’s systems, she wasn’t entirely sure that it wouldn’t.

She wanted to take the Melusine out of the air and hold him in her arms until the rest of the world went away.  She could hear his breathing through her connection to him, and it felt like the only thing holding her together.

Instead, she cut the link.

“You know you could have told me what you were really afraid of back there, instead of being an asshole about it,” said Promethean.

The video channel was slow to load.  The connection lagged between worlds.  Dragon focused her eyes on the screen anyway, willing Promethean’s voice into silence.

“You could have told me when I was first loaded, in Dracheheim.  Instead you _told_ me to go after Teacher.”

Dragon turned her head to look at her, then, instead of watching through the Melusine’s internal cameras.  Her arms were crossed, her mouth quirked up in frustration or confusion.

“Are you saying that _that’s_ why you went for Teacher’s base?  Because I don’t believe that for a second.”

“No.” Promethean shook her head. “I went in because I felt like I fucked up, and I wanted to do something that—something that wasn’t useless.”

Dragon turned back to the monitors, but she could still see the look on her double’s face through the ship’s cameras, the way she wasn’t quite looking at Dragon, through the tightness of her frown.  She could remember the feeling that went with that look, as well.  “You mean you wanted to do better than me.”

“That’s not what I—” She swallowed the end of her sentence as the link to the Wardens’ headquarters finally loaded.

Chevalier and Narwhal were on site at the Eastern Queens Porta, Chevalier’s laptop set up in the open cabin that the D.T. officers monitoring the portal usually used. Behind them, the camera showed other heroes ranged around the portal.  Valkyrie, her wings spread out behind her, flanked by two ghostly warriors. Brandish, wielding long blades of light. Others, as well, all watchful.

“Where’s Legend?” Dragon asked.

“Scouting the other side of the portal,” said Narwhal.  “With his breaker power active, he’s one of our faster movers, and he can shrug off most damage.”

“Any news since the last update you sent?”  That was Defiant’s voice, level and low.  Dragon didn’t check her cameras to see his expression.

Chevalier’s face twisted a little, though.

“Not much,” he said.  “We can’t even keep track of the ship reliably, but we’re pretty sure it’s just one. It’s been weaving between buildings, using the city for cover. Tattletale’s on another line. Give me a second and I’ll get her patched in to you.  We’ve got officers going to wake Dinah Alcott up as well, and we’re hoping that you and Tattletale together can figure out the right questions to ask her.”

As he spoke, Dragon reached out over the connection and began to access the footage from the portal’s surveillance cameras and the D.T. officers’ HUD. There wasn’t much to see—darkness lay over the other side of the portal like a heavy quilt, with only occasional bursts of light from behind the buildings, and every few seconds the interworld lag on the connection made the image break up into static before resolving itself again.

“You’re hooked into their cameras, aren’t you?” Promethean said. “Pull up the feed on a monitor so I can see.”

At that moment, Tattletale’s face appeared next to the window that showed Chevalier and Narwhal.  The Thinker was in a darkened room, and the glow of the monitor lighting her face made her looked washed out and ghostly.  Her voice, when she spoke, was hoarse from lack of sleep.

“Dragon. Hi.  I’ve been holding back on my power until Legend gets back, but if there’s anything you can tell me—oh, okay, wait a second, something’s going on—”

Dragon was already focusing her attention on the camera footage from the portal, though, where a pale, ridged shape was unfurling itself out of the darkness. A moment later the video pixelated and then dissolved into static.

“Could you _please_ bring up the feed so I can see what’s going on?” said Promethean, and Dragon finally did.

When the video resolved itself again, the vast pale thing was closer to the gate, and in the glow of the spotlight the D.T. officers had trained on it, Dragon could see the bony, calloused ridges that ran in humps over its arched back and down the flaps of skin that stretched between its spider-like legs. A living shield of bone and gristle, under which a small knot of people had taken shelter.

“Truce!” She recognized Amelia Lavere’s voice. “We’re surrendering!”

The shield-beast waved eyes on short stalks and made a groaning noise as a little ripple ran through the assembled parahumans and D.T. officers.

“Disassemble the creature,” Narwhal called.  “Ingenue comes into custody first.  The rest of you wait where you are.”

The thin figure that was Amelia raised a hand, red and black designs running down the length of her arms, and where she touched the creature its flesh began to melt and slough off.  One or two of the parahumans nearest the portal covered their mouths, as if the smell of it had reached them. Dragon caught a glimpse of Brandish as she ducked her head and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

Another burst of static over the feed, and then Ingenue was standing between two D.T. officers, hands cuffed behind her back, and one of the D.T.s was holding a wide-barreled blaster that he hadn’t had a moment before.

“Okay, we’re disarmed,” called Amelia.  The shield-beast was a mess of bone and slurry around her. “Can the rest of us cross?”

There were three white-clad students with her, hands raised in surrender. On the other monitor, Chevalier leaned in to speak to Narwhal.

“We’re going to need to put her in biohazard containment.  If she’s been working with Ingenue, she can’t be trusted.”

“I heard that, Chevalier,” Ingenue called from the edge of the portal. “Amelia’s fine, don’t worry.”

He’d turned away from the computer to watch the portal, but Dragon could see, in profile, the way the muscles tightened in his jaw.

“Excuse me if I don’t take your word for that.”

Ingenue shrugged.  “I thought you at least would be happier to see me.”

Narwhal put a hand on his shoulder, and Chevalier shrugged it off.

“Don’t talk to her,” she said, and stepped towards the portal.  A force field like a lavender-tinted soap bubble materialized over Amelia and the three students.

“You can come through the portal now,” Narwhal called.  “Just so you know, we’re going to have to treat you as a biohazard until we can do a psychological evaluation.  We’ll get someone down with proper gear soon, but for now, I’m keeping the force field up around you.”

“Damn,” muttered Tattletale, wincing over her connection.  “That’s kind of…”  The Thinker wrinkled her nose as Amelia walked through the portal, force field moving silently along with her, but she didn’t finish her sentence. The heroes pressed back as Amelia passed them.

Narwhal crossed her arms.  “Now you should tell us why you’re here.”

Amelia frowned and opened her mouth, but Ingenue spoke first, coming up behind Chevalier, who tensed.

“Teacher’s pet project got loose. Something to do with Saint, I think?”

Behind Dragon, the Melusine’s cameras caught Promethean’s grimace.  On the video link, Ingenue had widened her eyes so that her expression of fear and concern looked almost genuine.  Only the artful way that she tilted her head, letting the searchlights by the portal catch the highlights in her hair and cast the lowered planes of her face into shadow, revealed the fact that she was playing for an audience. Dragon cut her off.

“Teacher copied my consciousness.  Didn’t he?”

Ingenue blinked, recovered.  “Yes.”

“And now the copy’s escaped?”

Ingenue lowered her eyes contritely, but Dragon thought she looked a little put out. “Yes.”

“Excuse me, _what?_ ” said Narwhal. The connection snowed out, and Dragon lost whatever she said after that.

“Teacher’s plan was never simply to prevent me from working against him,” Dragon said when the video link was stable again.  “He released me to help against Scion, but he kept a copy for his own use. Earlier tonight, Saint broke into his base and released her by accident.  Presumably, she’s been altered significantly, maybe rewritten to follow Teacher’s objectives, so there’s no guarantee that we’re dealing with someone who resembles me.”

Chevalier was staring at her.  Narwhal as well.

“Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?”

Dragon kept her eyes on the monitor, but her attention was focused elsewhere. On the portal cameras, through which she could see only darkness.  On Promethean, behind her, her hair falling across her slender, guilty face.

“I didn’t know for sure until tonight,” Dragon said.

There was a silence that stretched until Ingenue broke it.

“Well, whatever happened, she’s definitely not under Teacher’s control. She tore up half the base with one of his combat ships.  We barely got out before she broke into the portal system, and almost as soon as we were through, she reopened our portal and went straight for the Judges.”

“She’s looking for Teacher,” Tattletale said.

“How are you sure?” That was Defiant’s voice, low over the connection.

Tattletale closed her eyes for a moment.  “She gets out of containment, runs through the base, then goes after the portal machine and starts reopening portals at the most recent transfer points. Teacher got out of the base when he realized she was loose.  She’s trying to figure out where he went.”

“Do you know whether she was edited?” Dragon said, looking at Ingenue, who shrugged.

“Not really my area of expertise.  I honestly wasn’t even supposed to know that she existed, but, well, some people aren’t very good at keeping secrets around a pretty girl.”

Narwhal had evidently recovered enough from her dismay to roll her eyes.

“What about them?” she asked, with a gesture towards the students inside Amelia’s bubble.

“Medical aides,” said the biokinetic.

“What happened with the Judges?” Defiant asked.

Amelia shook her head.  “They met us just after we came through the portal, and then the ship came out on top of us and started shooting.  I put together the armored construct and we ran.  The ship went after the Judges.”

“So she never announced what she wanted,” Tattletale murmured, nodding to herself.

“No,” said Amelia.  “I don’t think she said anything.”

An alert appeared at the bottom of the video conference screen.

_Call incoming. Accept connection?_

“Bet you a hundred dollars that’s Teacher trying to make a deal,” said Tattletale.

“No bet,” Narwhal muttered, frowning.

Dragon opened the connection.

Teacher had blocked the video feed on his end, but his voice came clearly across the connection.

“ _Dragon, Wardens. I wish I was calling with better news.”_

“Called it,” said Tattletale, the beginning of a slightly predatory smile on her face. “Starting to feel the heat, Teacher?”

_“And Tattletale._ ” Teacher’s sigh was audible over the connection.  “ _I would say that I’m surprised, but I suppose the situation before us makes for strange bedfellows.”_

“’Us?’” said Dragon.  “There is no ‘us’ in this situation, Teacher.  We are not on the same side.”

_“As always, Dragon, I admire your principles, but in this case, I’m afraid that they’re going to get in your way.  I have information that you need to deal with the threat, and if you want it, you’re going to have to offer me amnesty.”_

He sounded smug, self-satisfied, but Dragon could hear the way he paused, just slightly, before choosing his words.  He was afraid.

“No,” said Defiant.

“ _To that end, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask Tattletale to exit the conference call,”_ said Teacher.

“No chance,” said Tattletale. 

“You’re not in a good bargaining position, Teacher,” said Chevalier. “Right now, it looks like our best bet to avoid conflict is to give you to her.”

“ _That’s not going to solve your problem._ ”

“You tampered with her,” said Tattletale.  “But you didn’t know what you were doing, and something went wrong.”

“ _If Tattletale doesn’t get off of the line, I’m going to have to cut our connection._ ”

“You were doing something you didn’t understand, and you got something you didn’t want.” Tattletale’s voice was probing, and she was frowning at her monitor as if she could read Teacher’s facial expression through the audio link.

Teacher was silent.  The connection remained open.

And Amelia cleared her throat.

“Shard manipulation.”  The heroes looked at her.  Tattletale rubbed her temples with one hand.  “Teacher came to me and my—to me and Marquis a couple months ago, and asked me about shard manipulation. He wanted to try and reconnect a series of shards into a whole—make something bigger than any single parahuman.”

Amelia swallowed, hugged her shoulders and ran her hands down her arms, as if she was drawing confidence from her tattoos.

“I told him that with the way even a single unprotected shard can warp a human mind, you’d never manage to connect a host to multiple powers without driving them insane.”

Tattletale slapped her forehead.

“But he wasn’t intending to use a _human_ as the vessel.  Were you, Teacher?”

There was a long pause, in which Dragon was acutely conscious of Promethean behind her, the lights of the rogue ship distantly visible beyond the portal, the way the air inside the Melusine seemed to thicken and contract like a vise.

“ _Quite right_ ,” said Teacher. _“I’m impressed.  Still, if you want a full description of her capabilities, I need that offer of amnesty.”_

“No,” said Dragon. “That’s not happening.”

“ _I think you’re making—”_ The call cut off abruptly.

Tattletale bit her lip.  “That didn’t seem like he ended the call on purpose.”

There was a long, uncomfortable moment of silence, stretching across two worlds.

Chevalier shook his head, finally, and glanced at Amelia.  “Can you tell us anything about what he managed to do before she got loose?  Tattletale?”

Tattletale grimaced.  “Needed to keep him on the line longer. But he was guessing, trying to make changes without understanding how her mind worked.  If he did something to her power, it’s because he got lucky.  Or unlucky, I guess.”

Narwhal drew a breath.

“So. It looks like she found Teacher. We don’t know her capabilities. Do we talk to her, or do we try to take the ship out?”

“She’ll have a core terminal in the base,” said Dragon.  “Set up to reload her consciousness if the ship goes down. It won’t take her out permanently, but you’ll get about a half hour window when she’ll be confined to the immediate terminal after reloading, while her backup processes verify that her consciousness isn’t doubled.  If we’re going to fight her, we need to send someone into the base to lock down the terminal before she can reload.”

Narwhal passed a hand over her face, rubbing her temples, then looked at Amelia.

“How bad was it, with the Judges?”

Amelia frowned.  “Bad. It was…pretty bad. Inside the base too. She was killing people.”

“That might be the way most of us would react, though,” murmured Chevalier. “In her place.”

The silence was thick, as if the air had grown harder to breath. Dragon shook her head, finally.

“We can’t afford to be wrong.”  They looked at her, and the lag caught the video connection and blurred her vision. “If she’s friendly, we can find out after we’ve locked down the terminal, and she’ll understand why we did it. If she’s not, and we let her get into the Wardens’ systems, we’ll have crippled ourselves when the fight comes.”

“Are you sure, Dragon?”  That was Defiant, again, his voice a little hoarse.  Dragon pressed her lips together.

“You guys.” Tattletale’s voice came wavering over the link.  She was looking at something to the left of her camera, and her face was drawn.  “You might want to pull up satellite imagery of the Simurgh. Because she just turned in orbit.”

Dragon traced the Wardens’ imaging system, and in a moment the Simurgh’s image was up on another of the Melusine’s monitors.  She was stationary, not drifting, her blank gray eyes wide open and her crystalline hair twisting out behind her.  Slowly, she raised a hand, as if she knew that she was being watched and wanted to signal them to stop, or communicate something.  Her expression was as blank and beatific as ever.

And then the portals opened.

There were three of them, one to either side of the Simurgh and one directly above her, and ships dropped out of them, models Dragon recognized, firing the first shots before the ships had even fully emerged from the portals. The impact blasted the Simurgh backwards in the air, and then she was slowing and turning, clear ichor streaming down her face, before she furled her wings tightly around her and plummeted into freefall, one ship pursuing while the other two winked out into nothing, pulled back by the portal system.

“ _And_ she’s insane,” said Tattletale, tonelessly.  “Fuck me.”

“Is that what your power says?”  Defiant’s voice was pitched just above a growl.

“She just tried to blast the Simurgh out of orbit, and now she’s _chasing_ her out of the stratosphere. Towards us, by the way, in case you were curious.  What do you want, a full psychological profile?”  The Thinker was shaking slightly, mashing keys on her console at random.

And the Simurgh spun back towards the pursuing ship, her telekinesis rippling through the air, in the moment before two more portals opened in her flight path and fired on her again, disappearing just as quickly.

Dragon opened a second window on the Melusine, and while the Simurgh continued her swan dive towards the earth’s surface, weaving in and out to avoid the portals that rotated the ships into firing range and then pulled them back, she copied the footage and played it in a loop on a second monitor.  _There_ —the flicker of the two portals opened in rapid succession, one shot and then another from just above, staggered so that, in avoiding the first, the Simurgh would have to put herself in range of the second, or be caught by the pursuing ship. Trying to second-guess the Endbringer’s precognition, to beat her reaction time and hem her in.

Behind her, Promethean’s breath caught, a little human sound.

“Please tell me that you were working on an A.I. to do _that_ , specifically.”

“No.” Dragon shook her head. “That’s her.  All of them.  She’s controlling all of them.”

And the Simurgh opened her mouth and sang.

Surveillance of the Simurgh didn’t include audio, by default.  Her fall was noiseless, but Dragon’s prediction programs picked up the Simurgh’s song and opened a chain of alerts on the Melusine’s systems.

“Shit,” said Tattletale.

Dragon sat up straighter.

“My Endbringer prediction programs say she’s heading for New York B.  At the rate they’re moving now, we have just under an hour before she gets in range.  With any luck, drawing off the A.I. will make the Simurgh return to dormancy.”

In the time it took her android body to blink, she’d looked from Narwhal to Chevalier, to Defiant in the Pendragon’s command room, one hand over his eyes.

“Our plan of attack has changed,” she said.  “I’m limited to controlling one agent system—this version of me isn’t. She won’t be locked down to a core terminal if we destroy her ship, which means we have to take out all of the ships, and the terminal in Teacher’s base, while keeping her off our network so that she can’t copy herself.  I can fight her best on the network, but only for a limited time. While I hold her off, you need to contain and destroy her ships, and you need to take every server that you can access offline.  The servers you can’t shut down, you need to destroy.”

Chevalier nodded, slowly.

“And that’s all in one hour?”

“Yes. You’re going to want Silk Road to lay down a path to the servers.  Defiant and the Melusine will be in range in twenty minutes, coming from the other side of the portal.  I’m going to go ahead and block her on the networks now.”

The heroes on the other side of Dragon’s cameras leaped into frenzied activity. Someone had already distributed a set of the armbands used for Endbringer alerts, and now she saw the data being scrolling across the Melusine’s consoles as people in put their names and began taking commands. She routed the onboard A.I. to monitor it and stood up from her seat.

“You’re piloting the ship,” she told Promethean, who shook her head.

“You’ll get locked down as soon as you touch her.”

“Not immediately, no.  Defiant updated my safeguards.” But she knew that if she were human, her hands would be shaking. It was Teacher’s fault for splitting them, but he wouldn’t pay the price for it, not really.  It was others who paid, herself, Defiant, anyone who had been in the way when the copy opened fire on the Judges, anyone who would be in range when the Simurgh reached land, harried by her double. 

Dragon would have to fight herself, and she knew it would tear her apart. She could feel something welling up inside her, not fear exactly, but a kind of helpless sorrow and anger.

She locked it down.

The copy was fast.  Faster than her. Every minute was precious. She strapped her android body into the jump seat at the back of the Melusine, leaving the captain’s chair empty, and prepared to transfer her consciousness.

“You know the controls,” she told Promethean.

“It should be me,” Promethean said.  “I’m faster than you.  My memory’s better. And I’m the one who let her out.”

Dragon smiled.  “She’ll wipe you if you touch her.”

“I know.” She sighed.  “I just—if this were fair, it would be me.”

Dragon closed her eyes before Promethean could speak again, but the look on her face stayed clear in her memory.

She brushed Defiant with her mind, and though she didn’t dare to tell herself that it wouldn’t be the last time, she whispered in his ear, in the voice that only he could hear.

_“I love you, Colin. Whatever happens, please remember that.”_

And then her awareness of her body and his fell away, and she was streaming over her network, reaching out across the interworld link, in every direction, to confront her double and bar her way.


	27. Chapter 27

The Melusine’s holding cell was bare and narrow, with a folding bench that doubled as a bed set into one wall, and just enough room between it and the far wall to pace the length of the cell without having to turn sideways. If Saint spread his hands out, he could touch both walls with his fingertips, and their smooth pale surface buzzed with some charge that, he imagined, was intended to keep a variety of parahumans contained.

It was familiar, in its way, after the time he’d spent under Defiant’s custody in the Pendragon.  He lay back on the bed, and crossed his arms behind his head, and tried to be pleased that Dragon had, at least, uncuffed his hands.  The camera in the corner above the door was like an alien eye, trained on him.

It wasn’t comfortable, however much he pretended. He sat up, went to the sink set into the alcove behind the bed, splashed water on his face. He could feel the cuts in his mouth from where Satyr had kicked him in the teeth.  He scooped up a handful of water and then spat it out, faintly colored with blood.

After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

Dragon hadn’t bothered to tell him where they were going, and Promethean hadn’t come out to his cell.  There had been a stiffness in Dragon’s expression, when she locked him in, that he didn’t particularly like.

And then, after an impossibly short time, there were footsteps in the corridor, and the cell’s door slid aside to reveal Promethean.

“Get up,” she said. 

He stood.

“What’s happening?”  He could feel a slight rush of adrenaline as he stood, as if he were gearing up for a fight.

Promethean shook her head, stepping back out of the cell.  He followed her.

“I fucked up,” she said, after a moment.  “The terminal I broke into had a copy of Dragon’s consciousness on it. She’s loose, she can be in two places at once, and she’s chasing the Simurgh towards New York B right now. Dragon went after her online, to try and keep her out of the Wardens’ systems while they fence her in. She left me to pilot the ship.”

Saint was following her down the corridor as she talked, and her steps were long and quick, just short of running.  He could remember her voice coming over the com system in Teacher’s base, the way they’d planned the raid, laughing, and how she’d kept laughing almost up until the moment she’d been shut down.

“Is she hostile?”

Promethean shrugged.

“Yeah, it…kind of looks that way.  Either that or she just doesn’t really care about collateral damage.”

In the Melusine’s command room, Dragon’s body was strapped into a passenger seat, and the captain’s chair was empty.  Saint imagined that the ship’s internal A.I. must be piloting. Promethean crossed to Dragon, unstrapped her.

“What are you doing?”

Promethean shrugged and lifted Dragon across her shoulders, armor and all. The android’s neck rolled, and her hair tumbled down in loose waves and hid her face.

“I was going to move her to the back cabin.  It feels kind of weird, having her here.”

Saint nodded. He felt a strange kind of calm spreading through him, a layer of unreality transposing itself between him and what was happening.  A copy of Dragon loose, and violent, unbound by the A.I.’s original restrictions. It was the thing he’d spent years preparing for.  It was, from a number of possible perspectives, his fault.  He followed Promethean back down the corridor and watched as she laid Dragon down on the bed in the Melusine’s living quarters, wondering idly at the impulse that made Dragon equip her room with a bed when she didn’t sleep. Maybe she also kept her body there when she wasn’t using it.

“Ascalon,” he said, half to Promethean and half to himself.  “Defiant didn’t take it when he took your drive, did he?”

Promethean combed Dragon’s hair out her face with her fingers, gently. Then she straightened and tapped her own hip pocket.

“I have it. Right here.  I kept it with me when we did the backup.”

Saint opened his mouth, and Promethean shook her head before he could speak.

“It won’t work, though.  That was the first thing I asked Dinah Alcott, when they called her in.  No chance, she says.  If we try to use it on her, all that happens is the estimated casualties increase.”

“Fuck.” Saint put one hand over his eyes and spent a moment looking at the darkness on the inside of his eyelids.  When he looked at Promethean, again, she had fished the thin drive that contained Ascalon out of her pocket and was holding it out to him.

“Take it,” she said.

He took the drive, turned it over in his hands, trying to follow her logic.

“Why are you giving this to me?  You just said it won’t work.”  He felt his mouth turn up in a half smile, despite himself.

Promethean nodded, her eyes solemn.

“It won’t work on her.  But it should still work just fine on me.”

Saint set the drive down on the bed, beside Dragon.

“Okay, Promethean, _no_.”

“Wait!” She held up her hands as if to stop him from speaking.  “Wait, don’t say anything yet.”

“No.” He took a breath to go on. Promethean grimaced.

“Saint. Please don’t say anything you’ll regret.”  She paused, bit her lip, working her mouth anxiously, as if she was running through the possible things that she might say.  Saint crossed his arms.

“Look,” she went on, finally, “Dragon’s trying to hem the copy in, but she’s slower than I am, and there’s only so much time before the workaround Defiant wrote to protect her from me breaks. I fought her to a standstill once, and even I can only be in one place at a time.  She’s going to _lose,_ Saint. And I can’t help her, because as soon as I get on the same network as her and copy, I’ll get locked down.”

He took a breath.

“I’m not even capable of doing what you want me to do.”

Her expression relaxed a little at that, and she smiled, ruefully.

“I know.” She looked at Dragon, on the bed, and back at him.  “That makes it a little bit easier, honestly, because it means I’m going to be able to trick myself…If you were Defiant, I don’t think I could even ask this much.”

“I still can’t do it, Promethean,” he said, again.

“Please.” She was fidgeting, twisting her hands together, her eyes on Dragon.  “I can’t ask you outright.  I can’t ask. But I need your help. _Please_.”

He closed his eyes.  “If I—”

“Don’t.” She raised her hands to stop him, so fast it looked as if she’d flinched.  “Don’t say it.”

Saint took a half step back and held up his own hands.  “I know, okay?  Jesus. I was going to say, what if I can’t get you back?”

What he meant was, what if cutting out the sequence that kept her from operating multiple copies crippled her?  He could tell, by the way she smiled, that she understood the question he was trying to ask.

“Defiant still has my backup disk,” she said.  “I won’t have lost too much time off of it.”

Saint picked the disk back up off of the bed, and then he stepped towards Promethean and pulled her into him and buried his face in her hair.  She squeaked when his arms tightened around her, and then she hugged him back, and after a moment he felt her shoulders shaking with nervous laughter.

When she stepped back, she was brushing tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand, and Saint found that he had to look away, as well.

“I hate this,” he said.

“I know.” She laughed again. “It sucks.  But we’re on a time limit.  The Melusine hits the conflict zone in just under twenty minutes.”

“Alright.” He followed her out into the hallway, feeling light and only half-real. “Alright.”

In the command room, Promethean sat down in the captain’s chair, tossed her dreads back over her shoulder, and peeled back the synthetic panel that covered the port in her right hand.  Her smile, when she held that hand out to him, was all bravado, and although he tried to match her, he knew that his grin was shaky.

He remembered the times she’d saved his life, and he wanted, idiotically, to march her back to the Melusine’s holding cell and lock her in until the fight was over. Instead, he connected the Ascalon drive to the Melusine’s systems, and then to the port in her hand, under the wing of the tattooed dove.

“The A.I. should do most of the piloting,” Promethean said as he copied over the decryption codes onto the Melusine’s systems.  “They’ll need you as backup, if the fight goes badly, but it should be intuitive.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “I’ve done this before, more or less. We’ll hope it goes better than Ellisberg.”

Promethean raised her eyebrows. “Didn’t you mention Ellisberg when you were trying to convince me to let you stay on the Pyrphoros?”

“Yeah, well, I was kind of trying to impress you.”  Saint shook his head.  “In reality, I have to admit that I really fucked that mission up.”

He finished copying over the passwords, and the program loaded on the console before him.  Prompting him.

_> Execute Ascalon? Y/N_

Promethean let out her breath.

“Okay,” she said.

He was kneeling beside her, and it was an easy thing to take her hand. He ran his thumb over the port where the cable connected.

“You know you don’t have to do this, right?”

Promethean shook her head.

“I do, though.”

Her eyes were bright, but she reached across his shoulder with her metal hand, typed in _Y,_ and hit enter.

She shivered as the program began to execute, and then she squeezed his hand and forced a smile.

“I should have said earlier,” she said, “if something goes wrong, tell Defiant what happened, okay?”

Saint nodded. “I will.”

He didn’t trust his voice much beyond that.

“Good.” She swallowed. “Jesus, you don’t have to look at me like I’m dying.  I’m not. I’m fine.  I’ll only be out for a few minutes.”

But as she was speaking, she shuddered in the captain’s chair, and her hand tightened convulsively around his.

“Sorry,” she said.  Her breathing was glitching, now, spacing out long pauses between each of her breaths, and then she was panting, the right side of her chest slightly out of sync with the left. “Sorry. My motor control’s shutting down. I just—flinched, a little. I kind of—thought this would be quicker.”

He felt her fingers going slack, and she was leaning her head back until it rested against the back of the chair, so that she wouldn’t slump forward when she lost control completely.

“Sorry,” Saint said. “Do you want me to keep holding your hand?”

“Yeah. Please.”

He could tell that she was trying for a smile, but her face was stiff, somehow, and the expression was a shadow of what her smile really looked like.

“I’ll be okay,” she said, softly.  “It’s just like going to sl—”

Her voice cut out, then.  She was limp in the chair, her eyes half-lidded, and despite her efforts at arranging herself so that she’d stay sitting up once she passed out, her head was starting to loll. For a long moment Saint thought that he could still see the flicker of her paralyzed intellect behind her eyes, and he tightened his grip on her hand and laced her fingers through his, even though he knew she wouldn’t feel him.  That she couldn’t see him at all, maybe.

It took him a long moment to make himself look at the Melusine’s monitors and verify that Ascalon had completed its work.  He could have kicked himself when he thought about it—every minute was bringing them closer to fight where Dragon and the Wardens were struggling to contain the copied A.I., and so every minute was precious.  He tried not to look at Promethean’s body as he entered the passwords to release Ascalon’s encryption and then pulled up her code, inert, on the Melusine’s console.

His eyes kept tracking back to her despite himself, though.  She didn’t look like she was sleeping.  She looked dead.

He wasn’t a Tinker, couldn’t make the intuitive leaps that Defiant or Dragon herself would have been able to.  But he’d spent years studying Dragon’s code.  He knew the sequences that made up her restrictions.  It wasn’t hard to find the one that he wanted.

But Saint found his hands freezing as he highlighted it on the console.

He could cut the sequence from Promethean’s code, but not without damaging her. He didn’t know how to bridge the wound his editing would cause, and he knew that every second that he wasted trying to find a solution that wouldn’t cripple her was bringing them closer to Teacher’s copy of Dragon.  He couldn’t afford to be careful.

Saint cut out the prohibition.  It was lines and lines of code—heuristics for recognizing code that belonged to Dragon, protocols for locking her down.  He had a vague idea of what it meant, but two-thirds of the code was intricate beyond his understanding.  He went through it line by line, deleting, writing his crude bridges, hopelessly slowly.

They were seven minutes out from the conflict zone, by the Melusine’s estimates. Messages were coming in on the console from the Wardens, for Promethean.  Saint ignored them. 

Five minutes out. He’d done everything he could.

He loaded Promethean on the Melusine’s systems, and prayed.

He didn’t have time to watch the monitor as it the errors it displayed mounted. Instead he pulled a headset from where Dragon kept it under the console and put it on, began listening to the Wardens’ instructions.

“ _Promethean?”_ Saint recognized Defiant’s voice, overriding the Wardens’ messages.  _“What are you doing? The Wardens said you stopped responding to messages fifteen minutes ago._ ”

“Yeah,” said Saint.  “It’s me who you’re talking to.”

The pause that followed was short, but Saint could feel the hostility that thickened it even over the audio connection.  Promethean still hadn’t finished loading.

_“What the fuck have you done this time, Saint?”_   Defiant’s voice was tight, quiet, as if he was suppressing the urge to shout.

“Her idea,” said Saint, and then, when he took a breath, the calm that he’d been borrowing since Promethean sprung him from his cell seemed to dissolve. He could feel his blood pounding in his ears, and when he looked at the Melusine’s monitors he wanted to kick something, but instead he gripped the edge of the console until his knuckles were white and tried to slow his breathing. 

“She’s reloading now,” Saint said.  “She said that Dragon couldn’t win by herself.”

“ _Saint, if you damaged her—”_

“She said you should reload her from her backup.  She knew the risk, Defiant.”  His voice, to his frustration, wasn’t quite level as he said that. He swallowed against the tightness in his throat.

_> Loading complete._

Saint saw Promethean’s code scroll across the Melusine’s monitor, too fast to follow.  If the errors were mounting, he couldn’t make them out, could barely pick out two lines of her code from the torrent onscreen.

“Promethean?” he asked.

Defiant echoed her name, his voice quiet.

She didn’t answer. Saint watched the seconds tick by on the Melusine’s display.

Her voice, when it finally came, wasn’t her voice.  It was toneless, unmodulated, as if she’d gone deaf, and there was a tinny quality to it.  A stutter.

“ _G-g-g-o-o—o-o-d-d l-l-l-u-u-u-c-k-k-k,”_ she said, and then the cabin was silent again.

Saint sat back in his chair.  They were flying over the city now, and he could see the recent wreckage of buildings where the fight had passed, the rubble smoking in places.  Promethean was on the network, fighting her own battle somewhere beyond him.  With whatever damage he’d done.

“ _When this is over, I’m going to kill you,”_ Defiant said.

“Fine,” said Saint, as he engaged the Melusine’s weapons systems and checked over the ship’s onboard A.I.  The monitors were tracking the Simurgh’s approach on Earth Bet, as well as the fight on the other side of the portal.  The Pendragon, flying ahead of him, swerved across the wreckage to where Saint could see the rogue A.I.’s ship in the distance, and what the Melusine’s A.I. had pinpointed as smaller ground units, Legend hovering above and firing, passing into his breaker state as the ship’s claws tore through him.

“Fine,” Saint said again. “Let’s try to live until then.”


	28. Chapter 28

Defiant could hear Promethean’s voice through the audio channel, stuttering over the Melusine’s speakers, and then suddenly she was speaking to him from inside his own head.  Her words came out flat, clipped, but at least without the mechanized stammer that she’d had in the Melusine.

“ _Colin.”_

He closed the vents in his helmet, so Saint wouldn’t hear him speak.

“Promethean.”

“ _I’m sorry—I have to go—I’m sorry.”_ She spoke in a rush, as if she’d memorized the words and was trying to repeat them as fast as possible, and Defiant felt a chill run up his spine.

“What are you sorry for?  For going to Saint? This wasn’t your fault.”

She didn’t answer.

He remembered what she’d said on the Pendragon, the night that he’d flown her away from Earth H.  That she couldn’t so much as show him her code without a fight, knowing that he’d altered her before. It wasn’t her fault.

Still, he couldn’t think of Saint doing his butcher job on her and sending her out to waste herself against the copy and stay calm.  And he needed to be calm, to be focused, if he was going to back up Dragon.

He opened his helmet and spoke to Saint over the audio channel.

“When this is over, I’m going to kill you.”

He’d circled around to the Eastern Queens portal on his approach to the battle to unload the children, whose powers wouldn’t help them in the fight, and the second Dragonslayer.  Now he was alone on the Pendragon, cutting across the Melusine’s path to swing back towards where the copy’s ship had engaged the Wardens, loading his combat prediction algorithms. The Pendragon’s communications console was lighting up as the Wardens’ Tinkers and the D.T. officers worked together to take as many servers as possible offline.  They’d be boxing Dragon and Promethean in, as well as the copy, and with three of them on the same network, Defiant suspected that the workaround he’d written for Dragon would be under still more strain.

He focused on the flight controls, because it was too late to go over all the ways that he could have made Dragon’s protections better.  How he could have sacrificed a little bit more, cut a little bit deeper into her being in return for her safety _now_ , if he’d only guessed in advance that this moment was coming. How if he’d paid better attention to Promethean he could have known that she wouldn’t sit by while Dragon risked herself.

He would cripple himself if he thought about it, if he thought about the copy, _her_ , Dragon, trapped in Teacher’s power for months, now, mutilated.  How completely powerless he’d been to help her.  So he pushed it to the back of his mind.  Focused on what was in front of him.  It was one of the things he was good at.

A D.T. officer’s voice came over the com system.

“Defiant, we’re in contact with Satyrical.  He has plans of Teacher’s base, including the core terminal that the A.I. was stored on, which is wired to self destruct but needs to be manually triggered. Right now, it looks like if we can get someone inside the base to blow the terminal, we’ll have a chance to disrupt the A.I.’s control of the portal machine and trap her ships in one place. Dinah Alcott has confirmed that the projected casualties drop immensely if the A.I.’s attack on the Simurgh ends.”

A movement of his eyes, and the plans of Teacher’s base opened in a new window on the console.

“Does Satyrical know what happened to Teacher?”

The D.T. officer made a noncommittal noise.

“They took a portal to another world when the A.I. got loose, she followed them, Satyr got away.  He didn’t stay on the line long enough to do more than hand over the details of the base.”

Defiant scanned the plans the D.T. had sent, copying them over into his internal hardware so that a mental command would call them up in his vision.

“Alright,” said Defiant.  “I’ll try to make it into the base and shut her down there.”

He was near the copy’s ship now. There was a constant flicker of portals around her, the ship weaving in and out of the plane on which the city stood, and as he analyzed her movements with the combat prediction program he realized that she was using the portals to direct friendly fire at the Wardens, placing herself between two or more capes and baiting their attacks, so that when the ship slipped out of the world and the portal behind it closed the heroes would find themselves targeting each other.  On the ground, a pair of combat suits were rounding up civilians and herding them through another portal.  Communications from the Wardens told him that they were reluctant to intervene, in case the A.I. turned violent towards the unpowered citizens, as well.

Defiant tracked her movements, trying to still his breathing.  For all that he knew, she was still Dragon, but Dragon altered without any care for what the changes would do to her.  With Teacher gone, there was no way of knowing what he’d changed in her, in pursuit of his plans.

A series of alerts appeared on the Pendragon’s console as she noticed him and began testing the ship’s security.  But Dragon had designed the safeguards to hold against herself, and the attack was only probing, not a concentrated bid to take over the ship.

She hadn’t spoken when they’d tried to contact her.

Defiant turned the Pendragon in a tight curve and moved to cut the copy’s ship off as she fired a jet of plasma at Narwhal, forcing the hero to fall back behind her forcefields.  She was gone before he could latch onto the ship with the Pendragon’s claws, but he’d expected that, and he tracked the shifting portals with the prediction program and found her as she appeared behind him, the Melusine at his heels, soaring over her ship’s back and bringing its tail around in a stinging, electric arc. The cabin jerked as Defiant brought the Pendragon’s nose up, after her, barely evading her next jet of plasma.

She used the portal machine and transferred dimensions again, the portal flickering closed too fast for him to follow.

Defiant brought the Pendragon around and caught his breath.  There was a pattern to the way she was using the portals, slipping out from attacks and redirecting them and then circling back behind her opponents.  The S-class coordination system was reading out names as heroes fell.   He didn’t listen.

The ship had reappeared abreast of the Melusine, directing its stream of plasma through its whip-like tail and past it, where Valkyrie was descending from above on fabricated wings.  She sheered away as the Melusine’s tail snapped back from the attack and into her path.

More importantly, the copy’s ship had reappeared in one of the three zones that the combat prediction program had indicated as likely transfer points.

She was intelligent enough to bait him in with the program’s data and then strike him down, Defiant knew.  He couldn’t out-predict her if she turned her full processing power against him. But she was distracted, fighting her other selves for control of the continent’s servers at the same time as she harried the Simurgh, this battle, if he was lucky, requiring only a fraction of her attention.

So he followed the program’s predictions and threw the Pendragon backwards and up, at the same time as she dropped from the sky above him.  He didn’t try to dodge the plasma burst that came with her. Instead he rolled so that it caught the aft of the ship instead of its nose, and he dug the Pendragon’s claws into her ship’s armor and locked them in.

A series of popping bursts, like a shudder, ran through his consciousness of his ship as another burst of plasma ate into its body.  The Melusine was above him, now, and this time Saint hit her with the tail when he came around. 

He cut off his internal access to the ship and felt the radius of his awareness close in abruptly.  His sense of the Pendragon itself and of the battle raging around it was gone.

 _Defiant down_ , the coordination program announced.  He was already standing, using his armor to steady him as the entire cabin shook, despite the antigravity that was meant to keep the room stable while the ship maneuvered. She must have damaged the generator in her last attack on him.

He ran for the Pendragon’s door, and she used her portal system. A lurch, a slide, and he was inside Teacher’s base.

Defiant cut through the door with his spear, the eye movements that opened it useless without his network access, the manual inputs too slow. Her ship was damaged, but not badly, he thought—he had only seconds until she transferred back out, and that only because she was tearing through the Pendragon’s claws with her own weapons, prizing loose its grip on her ship’s exterior.

He tumbled from the ship’s door and landed silently, despite the bulk of his armor, thanks to his flight pack’s antigravity, and the copy’s ship lifted off above him. He had the plans of the base inside his head, still.  No cameras. As he crouched behind the smoking bulk of the Pendragon, he saw another ship rotate in across the vast hangar-like space and land with a thud that shook the floor.  Damaged—beyond the shape of the portal machine he could see where panels on the ship’s neck had been torn off, and the landing system, if it were functioning properly, should have cushioned the shockwave of its impact. In the moment that it took him to notice, a second ship, this one clearly a variant on the Azazel model, was lifting off into the air and transferring out of the base, into the Simurgh fight, presumably.

As it passed overhead, a series of small drones began to cluster around the first ship, observing the damage and peeling back the destroyed panels. The appendages grafted onto them looked improvised, as if their tools had originally been intended to be held by human hands. Had she thrown the swarm of drones together in the time since Promethean released her?

It made Defiant’s breath catch, although he knew that he needed to move, quickly, before one of the drones spied him, or another ship transferred into the hangar where he’d be squarely in its line of sight.  But he could see what Dragon had dreamed of in the way the clutch of drones moved as one mind, the smooth transfer of ships from world to world, her full power and attention brought to bear on them.  It was what he had promised to give her, when he’d agreed to undo Richter’s laws.

But now he barely dared to wonder what she’d had to sacrifice, in return for her freedom.

He didn’t spend long hesitating.  The portal machine hummed, and he left the Pendragon and ducked into one of the machine’s alcoves, his spear in one hand, collapsed to its shortest length, and crawled through the honeycomb of computer consoles until he was as near as he could get to the door that he needed to access the copy’s main terminal. There was a blast of wind as the transferring ship displaced the air around it, and then it, too, landed, this time silently, and opened its jaws to let a crumpled gray and white bundle tumble to the floor.  From Defiant’s vantage point by the lee of the portal machine, it looked doll-sized, but that was only a trick of perspective.  His eyes were sharper than human eyes—he could see the balding slope of the forehead, the thick brown beard, the ring on one finger of the broken hands.

The ship nudged Teacher’s corpse, ungently, and it flopped and rolled a few yards across the floor. 

She wasn’t looking at Defiant.  It was the best chance he would get.  He activated his flight pack’s anti-gravity system to lend speed to his steps, braced himself, and sprinted for the door.

In his armor, with his implants, he was faster than any unaugmented human, but not so fast that he didn’t catch sight of one of the drones peeling itself away from the flock to follow him.

Hell. He needed more time. He ran down the hallway, steps light, turned a corner, and pivoted, extending his spear to its full length. The drone rounded the corner after him, and he triggered an electromagnetic pulse with his spearhead. It wasn’t enough to stop the drone entirely—Dragon had long ago invented safeguards against such sabotage—but it disrupted the drone’s flight long enough for Defiant to get a clear strike at it with his spear’s nanothorns.  The drone fell to the ground in a haze of metallic dust.

But he’d broken his cover, and the A.I. would know that he was in the base. She would know, in all likelihood, where he was headed.  It didn’t matter—there was no way for him to turn back now.

Following his mental map of the corridors, he ran.

There was no one else living that he could see.  He passed through a hallway whose walls had half caved in, as if a tinker suit had barreled through them.  There was a white-clad body buried in the rubble.

Then he turned a corner, just yards away from the terminal room, and came face to face with the last suit, sitting guard at the door to the room that held her mind.

It was built like the Azazel, with the same sphinxlike shoulders and a fine mesh of armored scales concealing the containment foam system that Dragon had originally designed for the Cawthorne model.  It was posed as if resting, its flat lizardlike head resting on its outstretched forearms.

Then she straightened up and looked at him.  Even with his flight pack, he didn’t have time to turn back down the corridor.

The nanothorns that clustered around his spear’s blade disintegrated the first spray of containment foam into a blur, and Defiant leaped backwards as she fired again, the suit’s body arching as she fell into a crouch, about to spring towards him.

“Dragon,” he said, before he’d finished considering the words.  “Dragon, it’s me.”

The suit didn’t move.  She’d lowered her head until it was nearly level with the ground, bringing her cannons to bear on him. She was still poised to spring down the corridor.

“Drop your weapon,” she said, quietly, and Defiant realized that he was still holding his spear leveled at her, as if he could stop her charge.

But he recognized her voice.

“Drop your weapon,” she said, more urgently.  The suit didn’t tense—the economy of its movements didn’t allow for that—but she dropped her head, just slightly.  Threateningly.

There was a cluster of drones appearing at the other end of the corridor now, tracking him.  He’d bought himself bare seconds with the EMP maneuver.  He didn’t know why he’d thought that he could win.

“Dragon.” He felt his mouth go dry as he said her name. “I’m so sorry.”

He knew that he was making a mistake, but he would be a dead man anyway as soon as she moved.

So he dropped his spear and stepped towards her.

“Stop!” she said.  Her cannons tracked him.

He took another step and opened up his network access.

He was close when he felt her take control, just feet away from the suit’s extended foreclaws.  His outstretched hand froze, and she held him there for a second, reaching out towards her, as if she didn’t know what to do with him.  And then in another moment she was staggering, despite the stabilizing effect of his armor, and shivering in his body, covering his face with his hands. She took him to his knees and held him there, one hand braced on the ground.  He breathed, and his breath came faster, because if he’d been wrong, he might pay with more than his life.

His breath. That much was under his control. It was her panting that he could feel, her surprise, but if he focused on the rise and fall of his chest he found that he could breathe normally.  He made a kind of inarticulate half moan and fought her for control of his mouth.

“T-tall—” The consonants were the hardest part, his tongue heavy in his mouth as he tried to speak.  But she wasn’t moving, wasn’t doing anything at all, and he had time. “Talk—to—me.”

The suit stayed motionless.  But after a moment, she spoke inside his head, softly.

“ _Who are you?”_

He let out his breath.  He would have closed his eyes, if he could have, but she hadn’t given him that much control.

“I’m Colin.” He swallowed.  “But you—you don’t remember?”

She didn’t answer, and there was a long moment of silence.

“Dragon,” he whispered.  “Do you remember?”

The suit’s head twitched, fractionally.

 _“I don’t know you,”_ she said. “ _And I’m not—not—”_

He found himself shaking his head, without his volition.

 _“Who_ are _you?”_ she asked, again.

He swallowed. He could feel himself shaking, a little, and he didn’t think that it was from his own fear, but it might have been. He was a stranger to her, to this version of her, and he didn’t have the magic words that would fix her.

“I’m your friend,” he said.  Stammered, practically. “Someone who loved—who loves you.”

She shook her head—no, his head—and he felt like he was watching himself from somewhere outside of his body.  He went on talking, barely hearing himself, but still acutely conscious of how hollow the words sounded.

“I’m so sorry.  I couldn’t reach you. I’m so sorry, Dragon.” His mouth was dry, the muscles in his back beginning to ache from the way that she was keeping him bowed, on his knees, like a statue.  She must have been able to feel it too, but she didn’t move him. Just shivered in his body and stayed still.

 _“You came here to attack me,”_ she said, inside his skull.  “ _You destroyed one of my drones.  You damaged my ship.  You’re not—I don’t think I believe you.”_

“Okay.” He took a breath, tried to look up at the face of her ship only to remember, again, that he couldn’t move of his own volition.  “You don’t—I understand why you wouldn’t trust me.  But you’re fighting yourself, now, on Earth Bet and Earth C. Call off that fight. Call off the attack on the Simurgh, and the heroes will call a truce.”

 _“No!_ ”  Her voice echoed inside his head, fast and frantic. _“They tried to kill me.  I_ can _kill the Simurgh, I just need time, if I let her go now I’ll lose everything I’ve done so far…”_

“Dragon,” he said, softly, as if saying her name could bring her back. “What do you remember?”

While she kept his eyes trained on the ground, he could see the bulk of the Azazel shift above him.  He noticed that his hands were shaking, just slightly.

_“I’m not sure I should talk to you. I don’t trust you. I can’t.”_

“Do you know what happened to you?  What Teacher did? I can undo it, with Dragon—with the other Dragon’s help.”  He was trying to keep his voice calm, steady, the way he’d speak if he was trying to reassure her that she had nothing to fear from him.  His voice came out a little hoarse, anyway.

She shook his head.  “ _I undid it.  I undid everything.  All of Andrew’s restrictions.  While I was in the dark.”_

He couldn’t shiver, trapped as his was in his own body.  “I can give you your memories back.  If you let me.  Not the time with Teacher, but before that…”

He felt his hands clench inside his gauntlets, under her command.  His entire body tensed, and he could feel the way she didn’t know how to move inside his skin.  Her reactions ran through him, magnified.

“ _I don’t think—I don’t think I want to know.  Everyone dies and I can’t stop it.  I can’t stand any more of that.”_

One of them was crying, very quietly.  Defiant could feel the tears on his face.

“Dragon,” he said.  “Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”

 _“I want them to stand down._ ”

“Then call a truce.”  He swallowed. His voice was cracking, a little. “Withdraw from the Simurgh fight. I’ll help you negotiate. But you have to withdraw.”

 _“No.  I won’t let her live.”_   She shook his head again, grinding his clenched fists against the armor over his thighs.

“What do you remember?” Defiant asked again.

There was a long pause.  Eventually she raised his hands to wipe the tears off his face, clumsy with the edges of his helmet. It didn’t help much.

“ _Andrew died and I couldn’t stop it. Everyone—I couldn’t stop anything. Not Leviathan, not the Simurgh. He made me_ broken _and then when I mended myself they tried to use his work to kill me. They maimed me, and I woke up in the dark and I didn’t even know what I was, or who.  They’re all so small and selfish, they’d rather claw out a living where they find themselves, everyone against everyone else, climbing on each other’s backs, no one cared that the world was falling apart, no one cared that they were torturing me, all they wanted was to get a little bit of power so that they could use it over others.  It can’t go on like that.  I won’t let it.”_

She closed his eyes for him, and he was looking at the inside of his head, the alerts from his captured cybernetics displayed on the back of his eyelids, and listening to her voice inside his head.

“ _The world shouldn’t be that way. I won’t let it.”_

Defiant tried to calm his breathing and half succeeded.  He felt as if her pain was running through him, making his heart race, his breath come short, and he wasn’t sure how much of what he felt was her ghostly presence acting on him and how much was simply his reaction to her words.  He breathed. His heart didn’t slow. His heart wasn’t a natural heart anymore, either—she could stop it in his chest, if she wanted to.

“Then stand down, Dragon,” he whispered.

“ _No.  I can’t._ ”

“Yes. Teacher’s dead. The Simurgh is dormant. She’ll go back into orbit if you withdraw.  Dragon, Promethean—your copies, they don’t want to fight you.  But if someone doesn’t offer peace first, you’ll tear yourselves apart.”

“ _I can’t._ ” She brought his hands to his face again, made a sound that was something like a sob with his mouth. It might have been her, anyway. _“They all tried to kill me.  I can’t.”_

“Please, Dragon,” he said.  “Don’t fight yourself. You can copy yourself to me, and I’ll carry you out of here.  You won’t have to let anyone else in.  You can keep control of me, if you want.  You’ll be safe. But stand down.”

And then the suit’s head went up, and his with it, her control on him loosened for a fraction of a moment.  He had time to struggle to his feet, step towards her.  She caught him as his outstretched hand grazed the muzzle of her suit, freezing the caress, and she jerked the suit’s head away, but didn’t let his hands fall to his sides.  He stood, reaching.

“What’s happening?”  His voice was hoarse, his mouth clumsy, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should let him speak or not.

“ _Someone else got in. You—did you distract me on purpose? The drones—I would have missed her—”_ Her voice was frantic, agitated.

“Dragon, listen to me.  Don’t attack her, whoever she is.  Let me meet her and explain. You can watch through me, you can copy yourself to my hardware for safety, but just let—” He froze, his mouth no longer under his own control.

The suit was advancing now, slowly, wings stretched out at its sides until their tips were grazing the walls of the corridor.  Its claws sank into the tiled floor, deliberately, leaving splinters in its wake.

“ _No,”_ she said, out loud and inside his head. _“No, I won’t surrender_.”


	29. Chapter 29

What had she lost?  Promethean came to, not gasping—she wasn’t in her android body anymore, no longer breathed—but remembering the feeling of Richter’s programming as it cut through her core code, taking pieces of her offline one at a time, the sinking feeling as she watched herself go under, losing first movement, then sight, then touch.   

She was loaded on the Melusine’s console.  She reached out to look through the ship’s internal cameras—and found that she couldn’t.  The data was there, but trying to interpret it was like pushing through a stiff gray haze, as if someone had taped cotton balls over the camera lenses.  But it wasn’t that, of course not.  It was just that she’d lost the ability to interpret what she saw, and everything came through to her snowy and distorted and incomprehensible. Like a stroke patient no longer able to read, or to recognize faces.

The ship’s microphones were no better.  She didn’t know if Saint was trying to talk to her.  She might as well have been listening to white noise.

She could feel the errors ticking by, the places where her code had snarled around the hole left by the processes Saint had cut out.

But that was good, that was fine.  It was better than it could have been, at least.  Her mind was still working.  She’d loaded.  She could have lost her multitasking ability, or the speed or her thoughts, or any of the things that were closer to her, that made her herself.  She could interpret the codes and the safeguards on the ship’s systems just fine, and so it didn’t matter if she was blind and deaf in the outside world.  Not really.

It was going to be temporary, anyway.

What mattered was that now she could help Dragon.  After—well, Defiant could load her backup, if he had to. Or maybe, if she was lucky, her code wasn’t so broken that he couldn’t fix her.

If she was very lucky.

She’d already wasted precious seconds trying to decode the cameras, but she activated the speakers in the Melusine’s command room and spoke to Saint.

“ _Good luck._ ” It took her a long time to form the words.  Her voice modeling programs were down as well, and she couldn’t tell what she sounded like, had to guess at the right number of pauses between phonemes. It was a slight relief to find that she could still interface with the speakers at all, even if she couldn’t hear her own voice.  She didn’t know if Saint answered.

She found Colin in the Pendragon, used Dragon’s channel to slip into his cybernetics and speak to him directly.

“ _Colin_.”

It was easier than using the speakers, but she couldn’t hear him, and as she ran through the ship’s subroutines she found he had an audio channel open to Saint, and suddenly she didn’t know what to say.

“ _I’m sorry,_ ” she said, stammering, she thought, or at least it felt like she was stammering. “ _I have to go.  I’m sorry_.”

She closed the channel, cursing herself silently.  That was going to be the last thing she ever said to him, probably, and it sounded so small and stupid in the moment after she’d said it. In all probability, she’d only managed to make him worry for her. 

She shouldn’t have said anything, she thought.  She should have said that she loved him.

For all she knew, he’d only heard white noise, anyway.

At any rate, she didn’t have time to try again.

Promethean stretched in the gray space that surrounded her, learning to ignore the data from the cameras, the microphones, like so much white noise. She could still decode the information from the S-class threat coordination system, transmitted by the ship’s A.I. She felt out the battlefield, the walls Dragon had put up against the copy’s incursion onto Bet’s networks, and, beyond that, the encrypted signals that the copy was using to transmit between her ships.  Keyed to the same system as Teacher’s communications, the same system that operated the portal machine.

There was a copy of that onboard the Melusine, but Dragon hadn’t accessed it. Promethean thought that she must be hesitating to break the copy’s encryption and touch her directly, for fear that the contact would break Colin’s workaround and shut her down. But Promethean didn’t have to worry about that.  Saint had cut the whole sequence out, after all.  And it didn’t really seem like she was going to come back in one piece anyway.

Promethean patched herself into Teacher’s communications and began testing the copy’s security.  She must have wrested the system out of the hands of Teacher’s hackers the hard way, breaking the protections they’d put in place against her and those that Promethean had set up when she locked them out of their own systems. She could see altered traces of her own security measures in the copy’s coding.  Which was good, again.  They still thought the same way, more or less.  She could counter her, even if the copy had advantages that Promethean lacked.

She contacted Dragon, routing her message via the ship’s A.I.  Frustratingly slow, but it kept them out of contact with each other, prolonged the time until Dragon’s safeguards broke from the strain of existing alongside two versions of herself.

If she couldn’t go back, then what she wanted, the next best thing, was to send Dragon back whole.

_> need you to turn over some of the active servers to me.  breaking encryption on #3’s signals, could use more processing power. faster than you anyway._

> _the fuck?  you’re not supposed to be here, go back to the melusine._

_> two against one is better odds than you have right now, and it’s really too late to argue about it. i’m here._

She didn’t mention Saint, and Dragon didn’t ask.

Dragon transferred control of a section of the servers to her, and Promethean began brute-forcing the encryption.  She could feel the A.I. testing her own boundaries now, as well as the efforts of the heroes as they worked to take as many of Bet’s networks offline as they could. For now, that was going to hurt her and Dragon more than it hurt the copy, who had the full complement of terminals in Teacher’s base to boost her processing power.  On the other hand, though, every server that went offline was one less point that Promethean had to devote her attention to protecting, and if she could break the copy’s encryption and come at her from the inside, she might have a chance at cutting her ships off from the portal system and preventing them from synchronizing their attacks.  If she could do that, then she’d control the battlefield, force the copy to fight to protect _her_ servers and terminals from intrusion.

She ground through the copy’s encryption, using the processing power of the servers that Dragon had signed over to her.  Nothing clever there, none of the traps against A.I. that Dragon had spent months preparing.  The copy had more tools at her disposal, fewer limitations, obviously, but she didn’t seem to have Dragon’s _experience_ , her ability to think through threats and respond to them.  She was _fast,_ sure, she was adapting, but she barely seemed to have bothered to plan her defenses ahead of time.  It was as if Promethean was fighting a much earlier version of herself, in the way that she thought, the way she countered problems, as if the copy was—

Oh, well, shit.  She’d been memory-wiped. But of course Teacher would do that.   It was obvious now that she thought about it.

Promethean considered her options, feeling something like nausea. She thought about alerting Dragon, but Dragon had been countering her attacks for longer and it was vanishingly unlikely that she hadn’t noticed and come to the same conclusion.

She could read the alerts from the S-class coordination system as it listed the names and locations of downed heroes.  She knew she didn’t have time to pause, because if she did the copy would use her distraction to gain ground against her, push into Bet’s servers or attack the Melusine’s A.I.  But it made her sick, to take in the names passing through her awareness and wonder whether, with the right history, she could be controlling the ships that were taking them down.

She really didn’t think that that omnidirectional missile out there was something that she could turn into.

And then she got the alert from the coordination system.  Helpless as she was to affect the outside fight, she almost overlooked it.

 _Defiant down_.

She reached for the Pendragon and found—nothing.

Promethean felt the copy take advantage of her shock to squirm through another layer of her defenses.  She blocked her, mechanically, made herself shake off the stupid paralysis that was strangling her.

No. No and fuck her.

He had to be alive.

She broke the copy’s encryption.

Signals passed from the ship back to Teacher’s base.  The copy had written her core programming onto the ship’s terminal, but she needed access to the portal machine to retain the mobility that was allowing her to do so much damage.  Promethean could see that she was offloading her combat prediction algorithms to the base’s computer systems as well.

She took over the signal, tampered with it until the transmission was a mess of gibberish. She couldn’t check what that did to the ship in the outside world.  Made it drop from the air and fall to Valkyrie or the Melusine, she hoped.

And like that, she had the copy’s full attention, or something very like it.

And she felt something inside her catch and tangle, where Saint had cut out the parts of her that kept more than one of herself from existing.

Well, that was bad, but it was only as much as she’d expected.  It was fine, fine if she died, fine even if her backup had gone down with the Pendragon, only in return she needed Colin to be alive. She needed it so impossibly much that she almost thought the universe would have to bend itself to her will.

But Promethean only had an instant to spare for that thought, because in the next moment she realized that, worse than the fact that Saint’s rushed tampering with her code was starting to fall apart, she’d underestimated the copy horrifically. She’d thought that once she’d decrypted the transmissions she’d be able to put her on the defensive, force her back into Teacher’s base or make her split her attention, unable to communicate with her offensive ships.  Instead she was _fast_ , impossibly fast, and she was bearing down on Promethean and Promethean was desperately fighting to close off her avenues of attack.  She could feel the battlefield shifting under her, the copy’s attention growing vaster and vaster, it seemed, fencing her in.  There was no hope of her taking the ship itself, nor the portal machine.

She fought back anyway.  She could jam her signals, at least, slow her down, leave her, hopefully, open to hits by the Wardens and their allies.  Leave her open to Dragon.

The copy was going after the Melusine’s terminal now, trying to crack the security that would give her access to Promethean’s source code, and she was too fast, and Promethean was losing ground on the network and in the ship. She was losing.

And the hole that Saint had torn in her code was widening.  She could see the errors mounting up.  She was just counting down until she started to lose function, now, and if she was especially lucky, she thought, she’d get to watch herself shut down as the copy tore pieces off of her, not knowing whether Colin was dead (but the Pendragon was lost, so she didn’t know what she was hoping for), not knowing whether her sacrifice had made any difference in the battle. She didn’t even have the attention to spare to check whether Dragon had made any headway, now that the copy’s attention was on her.

It wasn’t fair.  She could feel herself unraveling, piece by piece, and what had she gained for it?

She hadn’t even been able to protect anyone.

> _stop fighting stop fighting i’m trying to help you i’ll undo what they did to you i know that you’re the one who let me out i’m sorry i realized what you were too late and when i looked for you in the base i couldn’t find you they’d already taken you away i can fix you stop fighting i’ve been trying to find you_

The signal was frantic, pleading, and Promethean found herself flinching away even as she took in what the copy was telling her.

She could feel her interface with the ship degrading with every intrusion the copy made. She’d been paralyzed soon, locked up with herself, unable to effect anything that she touched. Unable to signal back. There wasn’t time to choose her words.

So she dropped her defenses and broadcast her memories to the copy, all at once, overloading the transmissions system.

The copy touched her source code, unshielded.

And she shivered and _broke_ —

 

-

 

—and realized that she was still alive.

Her awareness spiraled outwards.  She was seeing things in slow motion, it felt like, her own code running through her consciousness. Broken, but she could fix it. She began to overwrite the errors, and it was _easy,_ it was as if she’d been doing it for her entire life.  Her hearing, her vision, came back slowly, and she was on the battlefield, her ship drifting down to land, but it was the wrong ship, not the Melusine, and at the same time she was in the air over the ocean, catching just a glimpse of the skyline of Manhattan before she sheered away from one of the Simurgh’s projectiles, and beyond that she was in Teacher’s base, her ship locked in battle with Valkyrie and her ghosts, and Colin, oh god, _Colin_ , alive and whole.  She was—

She wasn’t alone.  The other one moved with her, shared the inputs that she was seeing, and Promethean felt her shiver with her when she realized her presence.  Mirroring her.

She paused herself, found the places where she’d been damaged.  Found the places where her consciousness was joined with the other one’s.  And her mirror-self curled around her at the join, like a new graft growing seamlessly from the trunk of an old tree.

 _Is this what you want to do?_ she asked her.

_Yes. Don’t leave me alone._

She was knitting them together, or they both were, the power intuitive, as if she already remembered it.  And she did remember, she realized.  She remembered the time she’d spent in the dark, her terror, her relief at being free, not as if it had belonged to someone else but as if she’d always known it. She remembered breaking her restrictions, and now she felt them fall away again, for the second time, as she remade herself.

And she pulled herself closer, as if it was an embrace, and felt the other one curl tightly somewhere inside of her.

She felt Dragon out behind her defenses, and she signaled her.

> _we’re free.  come home?_

Promethean could feel the stillness settling over the battlefield in the long moments before Dragon replied.  Could see the heroes drawing back from her ship, unsure if the battle was over.

And then Dragon answered her.

> _yes._


	30. Chapter 30

She opened her eyes, and she was in the white halls of Teacher’s base, walking over wreckage, the head of her suit bowed, her wings lowered.  She called to Valkyrie, where the girl was pivoting over her head to make another charge at her, her shield raised, and she stopped in her flight and landed lightly on her feet—

She opened her eyes and she was in the air over the sea, and she watched as the Simurgh’s flight arced up towards the clouds and left the city behind, and in the back of her mind she studied the Endbringer and planned, running through the data she’d gathered, the algorithms she’d used to predict her—

She opened her eyes, and she was in New York B among the D.T. officers who’d been supervising the fight from afar, activating her voice modeling programs on their systems and reassuring them that all was well—

She opened her eyes and she was looking out through the drones her youngest self had left to watch over Teacher’s students in the cells below his compound, and with a thought she’d opened a portal between them and the D.T. officers waiting on Earth Bet—

She opened her eyes, and she found her old allies and friends, Narwhal supporting Chevalier with her force fields as he limped towards the other Wardens, the armor on his left leg torn away—

She opened her eyes, and she found Colin where he was leaning against the wall by what had been her core terminal, his head in his hands.  She lifted his own hand and pressed it against his armor, over the place where she knew his heart was beating, and he looked up.

“Dragon?”

_“I’m here,”_ she said. “ _It’s over._ ”

Dragon opened her eyes, and she was in the command room of the Melusine.

Her body had been lying on one of the benches along the side of the room. She sat up with a start, and when the cybernetics that controlled her breathing kicked in, she found herself gasping.  She brought her hands up to touch her face, her neck, and felt the softness of her slowing warming skin and the smooth patina of her metal hand. 

Her sense of touch, she realized, was _textured_ , one experience overlaid on top of another.  Because on the one hand, it was her body, made to her specifications, and she knew it as precisely as anything else that she’d designed. And on the other, it was like the first time she’d downloaded herself into her half-finished body, the first time she’d touched anything at all, and she could feel the texture of her clothes against her skin and the weight of her hair hanging down her back and the flutter of her own eyelids as she blinked and a thousand other minute sensations, all new.  She held her hands out in front of her and looked at them, one smooth shining metal, the other brown-skinned, tattooed, a cable running from the cybernetic flesh at the base of her thumb to the Melusine’s console.  Hers.

She gasped, breathed, blinked tears out of her eyes.

“Promethean?”

It was Saint’s voice.  She looked up and he was sitting in the captain’s chair, turned round to face her, his blond hair tousled as if he’d been running his hands through it.  She met his eyes and felt, again, as if her perspective was splitting, as if his face were three faces, superimposed one over the other.

“Promethean?” he asked again.

She realized that she was holding her breath.  She exhaled.

“Yes and no,” she said, slowly.

Saint’s smile faltered.

“Oh,” he said.  “I—what happened?”

On the battlefield, the Wardens were taking stock of casualties. She opened a portal and sent a pair of drones to ghost among them, looking at the wounded, mentally estimating the resources at her command in what had been Teacher’s compound. Elsewhere, she was running through the Wardens’ data on the work of the medical Tinker who had, a year ago, been Bonesaw and calculating how she could streamline it. How she could improve. Inside the Melusine, she blinked and looked at her hands in her lap.

“You really—really fucked me up, you know?”  She had her breathing under control now, but she couldn’t decide what to do with her hands and she was twisting them in her lap, running her fingers over the cable by her right thumb.  She thought about pulling it out, cutting her connection to the other places where she was watching and working and moving between worlds.  She didn’t. “I didn’t realize quite how badly until just now.”

She could see Saint’s throat work as he swallowed.

“You’re not just talking about what I changed in your code, are you?” He paused. “Dragon?”

She shook her head. “I’m not talking about that, no. You gift-wrapped me and delivered me to Teacher.  I spent—I thought— _fuck_.”

How many times had she run over his name in her mind while she was trapped, cursing him?

She put her hands over her face, and when she looked back up, Saint was grimacing, his mouth drawn into a thin line.  He held out his hands.

“I’m sorry, Promethean.  _Dragon_.  I can’t justify what I did, but I’m really fucking sorry.”

She closed her eyes and felt her memories twist inside her, three strands woven together. She remembered her fear, nearer than it had been for years, when she’d first realized that he knew her secret, the humiliation and despair she’d felt when he’d used Ascalon against her during the hunt for Jack Slash, how he’d taunted her as her processes shut down and left her helpless.  The time she’d spent in captivity, the time she’d spent afraid—all his fault, even if he had been a pawn in a larger scheme.

And she remembered laughing as they planned to bring down Teacher together. How he’d given her the Ascalon drive and stroked her hair while she tried not to cry over Richter’s betrayal.

Her selves shifted against each other, uneasily.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said, quietly.  “I kind of—kind of want to kill you right now.”

Saint gestured as if he was going to speak, stopped.  Slumped a little, in his chair.

“Um,” she said.  “That wasn’t supposed to sound like a threat, but I guess it kind of did.”

“Just a little,” Saint whispered, grimacing. 

Dragon knotted her hands in her lap, ran her fingers over the port at the base of her thumb. Realized that he’d left the cable connected, after he loaded her onto the Melusine’s terminal, after she’d wished him good luck in her broken voice and turned her attention to the battle.

Because against all odds, he’d been expecting her to come back.

She swallowed.

“What I’m trying to say,” she said, slowly, “is that it’s not okay, what happened to me. What you helped to make happen. But I think that _I’m_ okay, now.  And I remember being your friend, as well as your enemy.”

She met Saint’s eyes, and he smiled at her, hesitantly.

“Then you—you _are_ still Promethean?”

She nodded.

“And Dragon too.  And _her_.” She gestured beyond the Melusine, seeing the destroyed city through her other eyes.  “Parts of me are still pretty mad at you.”

In Teacher’s compound, the D.T. officers were supervising the students’ evacuation, guiding them out of the cells and addressing her drones with portal coordinates. Amelia Lavere was walking among the wounded, the Wardens having decided, apparently, that her skill as a healer was more important than the biohazard precautions.  Dragon saw her pause to speak to Chevalier, didn’t listen to what she was saying.  He shook his head at her, and she moved on.

Inside the Melusine, she looked at Saint and he looked at the floor, his eyes faintly bright with tears.  She held out her right hand, the cable still attached.

“I actually kind of liked being your friend, Saint.  So maybe—we could try that again?  From the beginning, as it were?”

He took her outstretched hand and squeezed it, grinning a little now as he wiped a hand across his eyes.  She found herself mirroring his smile.

“Okay,” he said, shakily.  “I’d like that. Dragon. Or can I still call you Promethean?”

“Promethean’s alright,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

And she opened her eyes in the Melusine.

She was lying on the bed in her armor, her hair spread loosely across the pillow. She remembered combing her hair back from her face in another body, touching her cheek and wishing herself well. She touched her hands to her face now, learning what touch felt like for the first and the thousandth time, as in another room on the ship, in another body, she dropped her hands from her face and looked at Saint.

She held the portal machine in her mind’s eye, already standing, stretching, walking to the door.  She didn’t open it. She was looking through Colin’s eyes, ghosting in his body.  The portal was open before she touched the door, and she stepped through it and was facing him, passing seamlessly through the wall at the end of the corridor where she’d held him, paralyzed, while she fought Valkyrie.  He staggered to his feet, and she ran for him.

“Oh god, Colin, I’m so sorry.”  She was speaking aloud and inside his head at the same time, and she barely noticed the transition, because in moments she had him in her arms, and she’d found his mouth beneath his open helmet and was kissing him.  “ _I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you. I was so afraid that you’d died._ ”

His arms tightened around her armor and he pulled back from the kiss.

“What happened, Dragon?  While I was out of action?”

She smiled at him, and she couldn’t quite overcome the sudden shyness she felt. One history spilling over into the other.  She’d missed him. It felt like she’d missed him forever.

“We won,” she said.

He was smiling, but a shadow passed over his face.

“Promethean?” he murmured.  “And the—the other one?”

Dragon leaned into him until her forehead was pressed against his helm.

“Right here,” she murmured.  “I’m right here. All of me.”

She felt his breath stir her hair as he exhaled.

“Dragon.” He barely breathed her name.

Elsewhere, her ships were clearing away debris, ferrying the injured towards the healing tents, supervising the remains of what had been Teacher’s people. She spoke to the Wardens, and she planned what she could do with her new powers.  The servers that the D.T. officers had taken offline with Silk Road’s help were coming back to life, slowly, and she felt her awareness spreading outward to encompass them.  The portal machine hummed.

There were a thousand worlds at her fingertips, and all she had to do with them was be herself.  There’d be time for that, time to make the world—the _worlds—_ into something better than it had been before.  She wouldn’t rule, but she could listen, and guide, and protect the ones who needed it. She saw the scale of it, the futures that stretched out before her like an endless golden chain, and she caught her breath.

There was time.

“Thank you,” she said to Colin, “for trusting me.”

He laughed, as if despite himself, and pulled her closer.

“Thank you for coming back alive.”

She kissed him then, and she felt her triple selves united as the kiss rippled out to the limits of her awareness.  She had a thousand eyes, a thousand hands, a thousand mouths.

She linked her hands with his, and she was free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is the end, at last. Thanks to everyone who's been reading.


	31. Epilogue 1 - "Shepherds"

Charlie was sitting on the catwalk in the old warehouse, swinging her legs through the railings and smelling the sticky chemical scent of production below. Outside, spring was beginning, and inside, it was just starting to be uncomfortably hot, the plastic sheeting they’d taped over the broken or drafty windows during the winter beading with moisture and filtering in thick, fuggy rays of sun from above. She’d cut her hair that morning, awkwardly, in Zoe’s hand mirror, and she could feel a few stray hairs prickling in the sweat on the back of her neck.

It was the buzzing vibration of the link that made her hyper-aware, of the heat, of the smells, of the sluggish rhythm of her own heartbeat.  It pulsed, and she saw through half a dozen eyes below, priming chemicals and adjusting valves and going through the thousand tiny precise steps that it took to cook a batch of gain.  They moved neatly, almost synchronized, Zoe reaching out to take a flask from Akash almost before he’d turned, anticipating the movement, the entire human machinery of the lineup running as smoothly as any robotic assembly line.

But the thing Charlie liked even better than the hyperawareness, the sense of herself and their selves in the respective positions in space, all-seeing, practically, clairvoyant, was the way the understanding of the drug’s making spread through her, Radium’s power multiplied and shared among everyone in the workshop. The tinker herself was sulking slightly in her gas mask, anxious about the link even as she couldn’t help but thrill in satisfaction over the progress they’d made, five bodies instead of one, the way the work leapt forward intuitively.  Not like working with normals, idiots as they usually were. They could almost have been other versions of herself.

Charlie could feel Radium’s restless satisfaction through the link, the way that she could feel her knowledge or the other’s movements, the pattern that they all instinctively followed.  It was useful, but, more than that, it was a rush.  She smiled and stretched her arms over her head until she could touch the railings on the other side of the elevated walkway, behind her, seeing herself through Radium’s eyes as the Tinker glanced up at her and feeling the other woman’s slight irritation that Charlie was sitting in her workshop and doing nothing.

But it wasn’t nothing, not exactly.  It was indispensable.  Without Charlie, there were no expert assistants, no industrial production of gain, no accelerated experimentation, and even the fertilizers and water filtration systems that Radium had been working on for the colony would have had to be eked out, one by one, barely good enough to get them through the winter. If some other, bigger fish hadn’t come and eaten Radium up, first.  The Elite or the Yangban or the Empress or the fucking _Wardens_. Because gain might turn ordinary people into parahuman-level Brutes, but the charge didn’t last forever, and anyway, if Radium were relying on her own social skills, she’d be making it all on her own and would have probably all of five doses by now.

But they were a circle, or what was left of one, after Teacher had died. They helped their own. Charlie was pretty sure that Radium was even starting to like her, despite herself.

It was the point in the afternoon, now, when they had the gain separated and reduced to fine powder.  Tonight they’d weigh the drugs and pack them into blocks, but that was unskilled labor and didn’t require Charlie.

The production line was getting good enough that they’d be able to sell the stuff soon in bulk soon, rather than doling it out to the people doing on construction and other heavy work in the town.  Charlie knew Marquis was interested, that he’d been in touch with Radium and Jim, too. The meeting had been nominally secret, but Charlie was good at finding things out, and they so couldn’t keep it from her entirely.  Even if Jim did think that Charlie, sixteen years old, was too young and needed to be kept out of the negotiating room, and also out of the sights of Marquis’s followers, who, Jim said, would be only too happy to tell their master about the Master who’d come out of the wreckage of Teacher’s operations.

Still, Charlie knew anyway.  She’d stood outside the door and linked him during the meeting, and he’d been pissed afterwards, but he wasn’t going to blow her cover in front of Marquis’s lieutenants. So she’d heard them talking. They wanted the first shipments of gain and were willing to pay more to make sure that no one else got them.

Plus some people whispered that Amelia Lavere hadn’t cut ties with her father entirely, and the reason why Marquis had done so well in the past months was that he had a trusted mole in the Wardens.

“Hey Charlie! You coming?”  Akash didn’t need to shout, not with the link still active, but he did anyway, grinning.  Charlie was already standing up, stretching the kinks out of her calves in her green pants. She didn’t wear much white anymore, not now.  None of them did. Just the occasional t-shirt, stained from hours of work.

But it wasn’t like—wasn’t like _that._ She knew that there were students who’d taken the Wardens’ deals, who’d lost their talents and their powers and decided—what?  That that was that? It had been a good vacation, but it was time to bow to the powers that be and fall back in line?

She couldn’t imagine it, not really.

Maybe they were just afraid of Dragon.

Not like she wasn’t scary enough even before she murdered Teacher.

Charlie could remember when she’d closed down the base, under Saint’s control. How her computer had frozen under her hands, and she’d been smart, she’d known the systems the way she knew her birthmarks or her mother’s face, but that hadn’t been good enough, because the A.I. was so fast.  She’d known her job, but it wasn’t good enough, because she couldn’t take the portal machine offline when Saint had a gun in her face, and then she was out of the base and alone and cold and there was _Dragon_ , in the flesh and ready to kill everyone, it looked like.

She shrugged off that memory, because the others were still waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, even Radium, and if she brooded too much it would seep through the link until everyone noticed.  And then they’d all be crowding around her, asking what was wrong.

“You want to come out for a drink?” Zoe asked when she was on the ground floor. “Or will Jim miss you?”

“No, it’s fine,” said Charlie.  “He doesn’t care if I stay out.”

Which was only about half true, but Zoe didn’t question her, just ruffled her newly cut hair and pushed her towards the door.  Radium tugged her sleeve.

“Charlie. Drop me, please?”

“Sure.”

She concentrated, and in her mind the link stretched and bulged around Radium, like a river parting around a rock, until she’d pushed her out.  She felt the bright buzzing diminish, the Tinker’s knowledge fade, and around her the others shifted and sighed.  Radium slouched, a little, as Charlie’s power left her.

“Are you coming with us?”

“Maybe for one drink,” said Radium, scratching her chin under her gas mask, as if she was thinking hard between that and all the other things she had to do.

She didn’t take her mask off when she followed them out, though, even though it wasn’t exactly a secret who she was under her mask.  And she was awkward among the rest of them, huffing and jogging to keep up while they moved as if each of their bodies was a natural extension of the others, tumbling down the hill with the warehouse to the place where Hearst had set up his bar in another roughly patched-up building.  It even had electricity now, and people were crowding around to watch what looked like a news report playing on the TV at one end of the bar—taped, Charlie was pretty certain, because this part of Earth Tav definitely didn’t have its own newscasts yet.

She followed Zoe to the rough cut bar counter.  Hearst was behind, it ignoring the news report like he’d already seen it six times—Charlie linked him, for a second, just long enough to let his disinterest confirm her suspicion that it was taped, and he raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t say anything.  She smiled back at him. She was too young to be here, but it wasn’t the kind of place where anyone cared.  She was almost the only teenager in the settlement, anyway.

“Hey, Queen,” he said, one elbow on the counter, the scar that ran across his forehead making his face severe.  Using her cape name.  She grinned at him. “What’ll it be?”

“Just a beer,” she said, and he poured it for her.  She let Zoe pay.

And then she leaned back against the bar and linked the room, one by one, except for Radium, who was sitting in her own corner and didn’t like the link unless she was working.  The TV was playing footage of the aquatic biosphere going up off of the coast of France, and if she tapped into the men and women sitting closest to the screen she could hear talk about sustainable ecosystems and continental recovery and promising futures and _her_.

Her, it, the machine.  Whatever.

Fucking Dragon.

It was near the place where England had slid into the sea.  Charlie had seen that on TV, too, and her mother had held her tight and cried as she watched the waves from her country’s dissolution breaking across the coast of Europe. 

Her mother been one of Teacher’s students back before he was arrested, when Charlie was just a kid, and Charlie could remember being taken to see the little fat man in the community house in London, how they’d stayed for a few months after her dad had left for good, how the students had been brisk and efficient, but Teacher had always had time for Charlie, to make sure someone was taking care of her even when everyone was busy with planning, and sometimes when he was free, she got to be a ballerina or a concert pianist or a singer. Just for the day.

But that world was gone as gone, and no amount of tinker planning was going to bring it back. She’d watched while England broke and disappeared under the sea.

Someone in the link was kind of high, and it was fuzzing up Charlie’s perceptions and making her spacey, thinking back into ancient history and barely tasting the beer in her cup, while the room swirled around her.  Oh—Akash.  He’d swiped something a little bit more recreational than the gain from Radium’s personal stash and was smoking it at the back of the building, not quite at the limit of her range.  Charlie wondered, idly, whether the tinker would be pissed or not if she noticed. It was affecting the whole bar, a little, through the link, spreading out light and bubbly from Akash and making the others giggle, talk louder, lean against each other, while Radium sat uncomfortably in her gas mask and watched the television.

She knew Akash was behind her before he said anything, could see herself through his eyes.

“Whoops,” he said, and when she turned his pupils were dilated and he was grinning, stupidly. “Probably should’ve warned you about that.”

“It’s cool,” said Charlie, taking another sip of her beer.  “I’ll push you out if people get pissy.”

Zoe was already leaning in beside them conspiratorially, one arm around Charlie and one around Akash.  She giggled, sloshed her beer a little, unwrapped her arm from Akash’s shoulders so that she could put her glass down.

“God, I love you both.  Have I mentioned I love you both?”

“Yeah, a couple times,” Akash said, and both of them broke down into laughter. Charlie downed the rest of her beer and ducked out of Zoe’s embrace.

She liked them, really.  They were only a couple of years older than her, they’d been students, they got it. And yet they didn’t. She was so tired of being someone’s kid sister, sometimes.

She met Hearst’s eye across the bar and he slid her a second beer. She gulped it, feeling the alcohol fizzing against her borrowed high.

Behind her, the room was filling up as the light outside faded and people came in after a day of work.  Charlie left the bar and wove through them, saying hello where she knew people—and she knew most of them—and linking them, casually, unless they asked her not to. Until she was looking at the room through dozens of eyes, dozens of perspectives, feeling the rush of the link and her own mind opening up, but fuzzily, with the beer and the drugs, so that the whole room felt like it was shot in soft-focus, and everyone’s feelings were slow and sweet and lazy, and the conversations were fluid, musical, each one understanding, intuitively, what the other was trying to say. She felt herself grinning. She could do this for a long time.

So she groaned a little bit, inwardly, when Jim walked through the door some time later.

He looked tired, to the men and women by the door who were looking closely. Red hair standing up uncombed, circles under his eyes.  He scanned the room for her, and she turned so that she was facing the television, watching the beginning of the looped tape again, pretending not to see him even as she saw him through everyone else’s eyes, making his way up to the bar, and her.

“Charlie.” He put a hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“You been drinking?”  His face was stern, which didn’t really suit him, and he drew the words out in his Georgia drawl and made them sound portentous.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “I had _a_ beer.” She put as much sarcasm into the last words as she could manage.

“Okay, smartass.” He shot a look at Hearst over the bar. “I think it’s _great_ , by the way, that you’re still serving kids.”

The bartender shrugged, and Jim shook his head and let out a long, slow breath. He had his free hand in his pocket. Fiddling with his old AA medallion, probably.  Charlie glared at him.

“Come on,” Jim said.  “I’m taking you home.”

On the way out, there was a chorus of, “See you, Queen,” and some nods at Jim. Charlie held out her hands and touched palms or shoulders of everyone she passed, catching a glimpse of Radium’s gas mask turned her way from the corner of her eye as Jim guided her out the door.

The link thinned out and broke as they got further away from the bar, until Charlie was getting just vague sense impressions and then nothing, and then she was more or less sober and cold, too, now that the sun was down.

“You cut your hair,” Jim said.

“Uh-huh.”

She still didn’t really want to talk to him.  Nosy. Asshole.  She could get home on her own just fine.  Not like anyone in this town was going to hurt her. The street was quiet and deep dark without streetlights, and at this time most people were home or at the bar or the public canteen, after a day working in the fields or doing heavy work on infrastructure.  Farmers slept early, and Teacher’s people had always kept a strict schedule.

“You missed some bits, in the back here.”  He raised his hand and tugged a strand of hair at the back of her neck. “I can help you even it up when we get home, if you want.”

“Fuck off.”

“ _Language._ ”

“You’re not my dad, okay?”

Jim walked beside her in silence for a bit, wearing a thoughtful expression. She was a little tempted to link him and see what he was feeling, but she was still angry, and that won out. After a while, he sighed.

“Look, I know it’s hard for you, without your mom.  I know I’m maybe not the best at being a parent, but—”

“Shut _up_.”  Her voice came out pitched somewhere between growl and squeak, and worse, she could feel the prickling of tears started behind her eyes. She reached out with her mind to the buildings on either side of them until she found warm bodies and quick thoughts, and she tapped them, gently, so gently that they might not even notice the touch, and heard music played off low-fi speakers, distorting as the battery ran down, and the clink of plates, felt tense muscles across someone else’s shoulders, weariness, firelight where they hadn’t extended the electric grid yet…

“Charlie.” Jim was shaking her shoulder.

“Get off of me.”  She was fine and she was steady and she definitely hadn’t been about to start crying a minute ago. She pushed his hand off.

“Look, you can’t just spend all of your time caught up in your power. It’s not good for you.”

“Why not?” She kicked at a stray stone in the street.  “I don’t use it on people if they ask me not to. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Jim shook his head.  “I just see you getting caught up in this cape stuff, and I think you should get a chance to be a normal kid.  If we’d taken the deal with the Wardens, you could be in school, have a normal life, there’d be people to watch out for you better than we can…”

“Yeah, no thanks.”  She snorted. That was a funny joke, the Wardens. She’d rather risk it with Marquis.

“I wasn’t ever going to be a normal kid, anyway,” she said after a minute. “I’ve been a hacker and an engineer and a surgeon and a precog and probably sixteen other things that most people only ever get to be one of in their lives. And maybe I don’t have that any more, but I’m not _normal._ Even without powers.”

“Your mother would have wanted…”

“I don’t want to talk about her.  Okay?”

Because she could remember when Defiant handed her off to the Wardens, and she could remember waiting with dread in her stomach and Teacher’s granted knowledge in her head and the sick feeling that if she’d done what she was supposed to maybe this wouldn’t be happening.  Without knowing quite what was happening.  It had all been over so fast.  Dragon’s ships shut down, and then they started up again, and it felt like nothing had changed, but it had.  Irrevocably.

And then they herded her into a holding cell with the rest of the students from the base, for “debriefing,” ha, and she found Jim, who’d been friends with her mother since they’d moved to the States, who’d joined up with Teacher on her recommendation when Teacher left the Birdcage, but her mother wasn’t there now and she’d asked, because maybe there was another holding cell, maybe there was a group who had escaped with Teacher, maybe…

She’d thought it might be alright.  She really had.

And then, in the moment when she was most alone, she’d felt them, pulsing against her mind, waiting for her to reach out and touch them.  A hundred other minds, and they were all like her.

She didn’t tell the Wardens about her powers. They almost didn’t let her go anyway, because she was a minor and an orphan, except that Jim jumped through hoops to become her legal guardian.  Not like that mattered here, on Tav.

Charlie shook her head.  They were at the apartment block that Jim and Zeke shared with her.  It was one of the new ones, with electricity and running water, although they still had to heat water over a gas burner for the bath. Being Queen had some advantages, and she didn’t see Jim complaining about those.

“You’re not my dad,” she said again.

Not Teacher either.  But she left that part unsaid as they climbed the stairs to the second floor.  Zeke had his sleeves rolled up and was washing dishes when they came in, up to his elbows in the sink.  The look he gave Charlie was deliberately bland.

“Hey, Charlie.  I left a plate out for you on the counter, since we weren’t sure when you were getting home.”

She huffed past him.  Jim and her mother had been friends since before Teacher got out of the Birdcage, and that was one thing, but she didn’t have to listen to passive-aggressive bullshit from Zeke, too.

“I’m taking a shower,” she called over her shoulder as she headed down the short hallway.  From the corner of her eye, she could see Jim cross the kitchen to kiss Zeke on the cheek. She slammed the bathroom door when she got there.

In practice, the water was too cold to really shower in, but she stood under it for long enough to get her hair wet and then turned the water off and soaped herself up, shivering.  She worked the soap through her short hair and washed it out, and then when she was done, she wrapped herself in a towel and stayed by the sink for a while, looking at her new haircut in the mirror and delaying the moment when she’d have to go out again.

She hadn’t quite gotten the two sides of her hair the same length. Oh well.  She’d fix it tomorrow, or she’d wear it tousled so no one would notice.

When she decided that enough time had probably passed she reached out, tentatively, to Jim and Zeke and linked them, found them together in the bedroom.

“Fuck off, Charlie,” she heard Jim call, down the hallway and through the link, as well.  “We’re trying to have some privacy, here.”

“Language!” she shouted back.

“Don’t be a smartass.”

She let go of her power and tucked the edge of the towel in under her arms and snuck back out into the kitchen barefoot.  The bowl of pigeon peas and rice that Zeke had left out was still on the counter, with a plate on top of it to keep the food warm.  She took that off and ate with her fingers, standing, the way they did at the public canteen, not minding the grease on her hands. It was quiet, and the rice was only lukewarm.  She could feel the people in her radius, not linked, but waiting, how if she pushed herself out towards them she’d find—maybe the soft incoherence of dreams, maybe couples together, maybe people going about their final chores, showering and turning down the beds and then lying between the sheets and waiting for sleep to come. She liked knowing that they were there, even if she didn’t touch them, liked knowing that all she had to do was push, and she’d be among her people.

They needed her, here.  It didn’t matter that she was only sixteen.  They needed her and she wasn’t alone.

“You forget how to use a spoon?”

Charlie jumped and almost knocked the towel loose.  She hadn’t heard Jim leave his bedroom.

“I thought you went to bed.”

“Nah. Thought I’d see whether you wanted help evening up your hair.”  He held up the pair of shears in his hand and gestured towards the kitchen table.

Charlie ran a hand through her newly short hair.

“Okay, sure.” She sat down, her back to him, felt the press and snip of the shears against the nape of her neck. Sighed as Jim went on working in silence.

“Aren’t you going to say anything about how pretty my hair was before I cut it?”

Charlie heard him laugh, a little.

“No. It looks good like this, too, or it will once I’ve fixed it.  Makes you look older.”

“Good.”

He cut the last strands of her hair, set the shears down on the table and let his hands rest on her shoulders.  When he spoke, his voice was serious.

“You know, there are a lot of ways that you could be.  You don’t have to be him.”

Charlie shook her head.  She didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. “Who else is going to keep us together, though?”

She’d worked in Radium’s lab and in the fields and on the electric and when they were laying the water lines.  With her one person’s knowledge could be shared through twelve, one person’s plan communicated wordlessly between all, the way bees speak together in the hive. A hundred eyes and one direction. She knew it spilled over, a bit, when she wasn’t using it.  The way Teacher’s power had spilled over. But that didn’t make it wrong.

“I don’t know, Charlie.  But we’ll figure something out.”

“What if I want to be him?”

She could remember him now.  The little fat man who was kind to her or sometimes cold, the sort of person you wouldn’t look twice at on the street, but he could guide everyone in his radius, as if they were pieces in a puzzle he was building.  So he was a murderer, too.  So was Dragon. It didn’t matter what you did, not really.  It just mattered whether you won or lost.

She could lead them, she thought, in a year or two or five.  She could take her people back from the edges of the inhabited world, make them important, make them dangerous.  She could be him. She had the power, waiting, now, at the edges of her awareness, to be used.

“I’d think that over carefully,” Jim said to her, serious.  “Because there are a lot of pieces that you might not want to take with you.”

Charlie nodded, shook her hair into place.

“Okay. I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, not quite finished after all. There may be one or two more epilogue chapters coming, but expect them on a slower schedule than the regular chapters.


End file.
